


Love is a Murder Weapon

by Catchclaw



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: Mirror Universe
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Angst, Attempted Seduction, Coercion, Deception, Established Relationship, F/M, First Kiss, First Time, M/M, Mind Meld, Minor Character Death, Multi, Public Sex, Rebellion, Romance, Seduction, Suicidal Thoughts, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2018-12-14 21:38:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 41,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11791974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: When Kirk asks Spock to seduce McCoy, it's in everybody's best interest for Spock to succeed. If only McCoy saw it that way.





	1. Chapter 1

“A _liability_ ,” Kirk snarled, “that’s what Komack called him. You believe this shit, Spock?”

Spock watched his captain pace the tight lines of their quarters, a caged, unhappy tiger. “How did the Admiral come to this conclusion? To my knowledge, he has never met Dr. McCoy.”

“How the fuck should I know? I can’t read that old bastard's mind.”

One of the reasons that Spock had enjoyed so much success in the Empire’s fleet--indeed, one of the reasons that he was still alive--was that he never asked a question aloud without first being certain of its answer. Here, the matter was no different: he had merely to wait until his commanding officer came to the same conclusion as he. Still, Spock knew, after their many years together on the _Farragut_ and then the _Enterprise_ , that James Kirk preferred to come to his conclusions, and so Spock sat back in the chair beside their bed and made his shepherding of the captain's thinking discreet.

“Do you think it is significant that the Admiral’s somewhat puzzling assessment comes so soon after our visit to Starbase XII?"

Kirk shot him a frown. “Why do you say that?”

Spock schooled his features vague, contemplative. “Perhaps our...unexpected encounter with the _Intrepid_ there drew his attention.”

He could see the moment that his innuendo struck home, for Kirk’s beautiful face twisted and he came to a sudden, terrible halt. “Gary Mitchell,” he hissed. “That son of a fucking _bitch_.”

“Captain?”

Kirk’s skin flushed, the red in his cheeks rushing down his throat, peeling over his chest, and he was the only man Spock had ever known whose anger was exquisite. “I wouldn't give him those civvies we rescued from the Mlladen system, would I, so he goes running straight to daddy. That asshole.”

“I was unaware that Captain Mitchell’s parentage included--”

Kirk stalked across the room and came to a halt in front of Spock. “You know what I mean, damn it." 

Spock met his gaze. “It was a poor attempt at levity on my part.”

“Yes. Very poor.”

“You did not have to listen to Dr. McCoy’s counsel. You could have given Captain Mitchell what he wanted; the civilians are of no value.”

“If Mitchell wants them, you can bet they’re of value. Though I’ll be damned if I know what it is.” Kirk’s mouth found a smirk. “And anyway, I haven’t given Gary what he wanted since the Academy.” Spock found himself making an irritated noise, unbidden, and the captain chuckled. “Mmmm, I know. You don’t want to hear about that, do you?”

The flare in Spock’s gut was not jealousy, quite. Whatever there had been between his captain and Mitchell had been ashes long before he had met Kirk. Nor was there anything inherently distasteful in the notion of Kirk giving his body over to others; indeed, it was often a source of great pleasure to them both.

But Mitchell was different. He had wounded Kirk, dug his marks into Kirk’s skin, his soul, in ways that seemed tenuously healed, scabs that given enough force might still break open. Kirk had loved Mitchell, and though that love had soured to a fierce, abiding hate, Spock knew there were parts of Mitchell that would never be fully excised from Kirk, sweet venom he would never be able to draw out of his captain’s heart, no matter how clever his mouth.

So Spock did not answer. Instead, he leaned back and spread his legs as wide as the chair would allow. He was still in uniform, straight-laced from his ears to his boots, as the captain liked to say, but the way that Kirk’s eyes darkened and sank right to his fly suggested that he might as well have been fully unclothed.

This was the best response Spock had to Mitchell’s ghost, always.

He let his hand drift into his lap, let the tips of his fingers kiss the outline of his cock until Kirk groaned, a rich, greedy sound. “I want to suck you off,” the captain said, rough. “Been thinking about it all day.”

“Indeed? While you were talking with the Admiral?"

“Yeah.”

“In the briefing room,” Spock said, tracing himself through his trousers, his eyes never leaving Kirk’s face, “during Lieutenant Rand’s rather lengthy presentation on the Platonian problem?”

“Most assuredly.”

Spock found the crown, teased it, his hips lifting of their own accord. “Even on the bridge, while Commander Uhura was agonizing Ensign Chekov?”

Kirk’s breath caught and he rubbed himself, shameless. “ _Definitely_.”

“You have been very patient, then,” Spock said. “Very patient indeed.” He caught the clasp in his fingers and pulled and Kirk mirrored the slide, sank slowly to his knees as Spock opened himself--again, always--and drew his cock into the light.

Kirk cupped the inside of Spock’s thighs and pushed his face in, his nose bumping Spock’s fist. “Fuck, baby,” he murmured. “You’re so wet already.” He flicked his tongue between Spock’s knuckles, a cool streak against the shaft. Turned his eyes up and gave Spock that small, secret smile he saved for these moments alone. Whispered: “You’ve been thinking about me, too, haven’t you?”

 _Every moment_ , Spock thought, turning his hand in the captain’s hair, every day, you are the first of my thoughts, the loudest, the torch in my head that refuses to dim, and you know this, my darling. You know.

His fingers found Kirk’s face and he felt the captain’s thoughts catch, like fire in a dead forest. He sank into his captain’s mind as readily as his mouth, felt the pleasure there, the confusion, the wonder that Spock could still make him feel this way, as if every moment were precious, every touch new, and Spock thought it was very, very good that the crew could not see Kirk this way: their furious, impetuous leader brimming with love, the feeling spilling from him as Spock’s come fell from his lips, as he stripped them both, as he sank into Spock’s body too ardent, too fast. Spock licked himself from Kirk’s tongue and murmured words he could say only here, only in the small space between their bodies as the captain gasped and swelled and when he came, his consciousness narrowed to a candle, a tight white flame that in that moment burned only, solely for Spock.

“I’m not getting rid of McCoy,” Kirk said, later, his words slurred with the promise of sleep. “I don’t care what Komack says.”

Spock stroked his back, traced a dozen scars whose origin he could name, a half a dozen others he could not. “That is wise.”

“Yeah. He’s put me back together more times than I can count."

Spock’s thumb caught on a particularly vicious slash at the base of the captain’s spine. A new one, healed only a week. Recalled Kirk’s silent scream of pain as he had fallen to the ground, the dragon’s fang still caught in his flesh. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“And not just me, either. It’s been damned useful to have a functioning MedBay instead of the torturer’s playhouse that M’Benga had set up down there.” He laughed, soft and bitter. “I’m not going soft in my old age, am I?”

“No. There is no question the crew’s overall efficiency has improved since you appointed Dr. McCoy to be CMO. And the recovery rate has been similarly affected. To give up such an asset would seem shortsighted.”

“Yeah,” Kirk said again, “but therein lies the problem. Komack’s ordered me to offload him once we’ve finished this patrol. How the hell am I gonna get around that? The man’s got eyes in every port.”

“And onboard this ship, very probably.”

Kirk groaned, hid his face against Spock’s neck. “Don’t remind me.”

A thought rose in Spock’s mind and for a moment, in his pleasure-spent haze, he was not certain if it was his own or the last tendrils of Kirk’s thoughts in his. “What if,” he said, “what if the doctor to publicly swear his loyalty to you? Surely that would afford him some protection from the Admiral’s whims.”

“If I made him one of mine?”

“Yes.”

Kirk stirred against him with a sigh. “It couldn’t hurt, that’s for sure. But I don’t think he’d be amenable to my invitation.”

“Surely, if he understood that his life was at stake, he could--”

A snort. “Yeah, well, I’m not sure how much of a damn he’d give about that.”

“What do you mean?”

The captain raised his head, propped his chin on his hand. “You remember that missionary we picked up a couple years ago? The one posing as a legit gunrunner who was really preaching that anarchy shit?”

“Ah, the democratic crusader. Reverend Mudd.”

“That’s the one. So Mudd’s in MedBay, after his first round in the booth, and he somehow snags a knife off some idiot corpsman.” He grimaced. “You remember how sloppy M’Benga was. Never took the safety of his staff very seriously.”

“To put it mildly.”

“Anyway, McCoy's on duty and he goes in alone to check on Mudd, and boom, Mudd pulls the blade on him. Snugged it right up against his throat. And you know what McCoy did?” 

“I do not.”

“Nothing. Not a fucking thing. Just stood there and let that traitor put steel over an artery. More than that, he doesn’t bat an eye--in fact, he tells Mudd exactly where to cut and how much blood there’ll be and fast he’s going to die, if Mudd has the balls to actually do it.”

“Interesting.”

“And the preacher goes to pieces on him, starts sobbing and telling McCoy how sorry he is, begging him for help or salvation, some way off my ship. McCoy doesn’t say another word, though, just knocks him out cold with a hypo, and when Uhura goes to grab Mudd for round two, McCoy didn’t mention it. Not a peep. He just let Security carry Mudd out of there like nothing had happened. You believe that?” Kirk sat all the way up, stretched his arms above his head. “I know he’s just a doc, but somewhere in that guy is stone cold, Spock.”

Spock studied him for a moment. “May I ask how do you know this? This does not seem like information McCoy would willing share.”

“Christine told me,” Kirk said, derisive, “right after it happened. She was trying to get me to drop the ax on M’Benga so she could get her goddamn promotion.”

“Which you did not.”

“Hello no.”

“An impressive if misguided show of bravado on the doctor's part. With such an approach, it is somewhat surprising that he is still alive."

“Yeah, on any other ship, he probably would’ve been--” Something in Kirk’s face caught, his eyes suddenly alight. “Wait a minute. Wait. Maybe we’re thinking about this all wrong.”

“Captain?”

“Well. Can we agree that McCoy’s an asset, and that we’d prefer him not to be dead?”

“Yes.”

Kirk brushed the tips of his fingers over Spock’s chest, still slick with their sweat and the second round of Spock’s spend. “Especially since that’s what Komack wants.” He traced his nails over Spock’s breastbone. “You know me. I’m stubborn like that.”

Spock bit his lip, bid a sigh from escaping. “You are.”

Kirk’s mouth found a slow, lazy curve. “And, as you said, making McCoy one of mine is an eminently logical approach to the problem. Might at least buy us some time. We might get lucky; Komack might get distracted by somebody even more annoying than us.”

“True.”

“ _And_ ,” the captain repeated, his hand slowing, each caress growing more distinct, “if we take his previous recalcitrance as a given, it seems unlikely that the doctor would find the threat of violence or even his own imminent death a sufficiently persuasive reason to do what he’s told, yes?”

Spock shivered, lifted to meet his captain’s touch. “He too, it seems, is stubborn.”

“All right,” Kirk said, chuckling. “So if violence won’t convince him to do what we both agree is a very reasonable thing, then maybe something else would.” He dragged his thumb over one nipple, then the other, and his eyes found Spock’s, a sweet burn. “Something you’re very, very good at, _ashayam_.”

There was a sharp singe of arousal in Spock’s side. Surely, Kirk did not mean--?

“Oh,” Spock said, “James, I--”

“What?” Kirk said, soft, his gaze counterpoint feral. “Would you object?”

“No, but--”

The captain leaned down, laid his tongue where his fingers had been. “We both know you’ll do it if I ask you to. Don’t we, Spock?”

“We have rarely spoken, the doctor and I. I would not know how to begin.”

“Did you know Carol when I sent you to her?” Kirk said. Closed his teeth over Spock’s nipple and pulled, none too gently, until Spock cried out and clamped a hand in his hair. “Or Marlena?”

Spock writhed, his breath short. “No,” he panted, “no, but--”

The captain made a low, satisfied sound and shifted, let Spock feel his cock, once again eager. “And yet, you enjoyed those assignments, did you not, Commander? You certainly displayed a remarkable rate of success.”

Spock reached for Kirk’s shoulders, rested his palms on that rough, beloved flesh. “I found some pleasure in those duties, yes, although what you are asking for now is not the same.”

“Oh, it most certainly is. Your body as a means of persuasion, Spock; I’ve never met its equal.” He threw a leg over Spock’s hips and stretched out, wound himself in Spock’s arms. “Look at it this way: you do this, you’ll be protecting him and protecting me. And I know how hot that gets you, keeping me safe.” His mouth found Spock’s, hard and fast. “It’s what makes you so good at it, huh?”’

“Please,” Spock breathed. He clutched at Kirk’s hips, raised his own to meet them, and he could feel his cock between them, wet again, straining to stiffen. “Please, James.”

The captain leaned into him. “Get McCoy to swear allegiance to me,” he said, an order disguised as a kiss. “Do whatever you have to. Kiss him, fuck him, suck him off in the turbolift, I don’t care. Just get him to pledge himself to me, to wear my mark, and then we’ll see how quick Komack is to try and drag him off my ship. I doubt the bastard’s ready to come at me head on.” He scratched a grin across Spock’s cheek, full of teeth. “Though you know, what the hell. Let him come. We’ve waited long enough, you and me, don’t you think?”

Yes, Spock thought as he opened his mouth below his captain’s, groaned for him, urged his tongue in. Yes, we have.

Three years, they had been waiting, three years of subterranean war within the Fleet, its commanders, its soldiers, increasingly divided along black and white lines: those loyal to Komack, the ostensible Head of Operations, and those who favored Pike, the man whose title Komack had stolen, a man once at the center of power now driven into the fringes of the Empire’s space.

It had begun as a struggle for control, as these things often did in the Admiralty. Five years before, soon after Kirk graduated from the Academy, the Empire’s ruling Council had chosen Pike to lead the Fleet. The move was, to put it mildly, a surprise to the old guard, who had backed Komack, one of their own. He had 20 years and a half dozen campaigns on Pike, had spent his life reaping profit for the Empire, and no one was more taken aback than he when the Council passed him over.

Indeed, on its face, the choice was an odd one. At the time of his selection, Pike had been the head of Starfleet Academy for ten years; before that, a competent commander who’d earned his own ship by 25 and been bored there, or so the rumors went. He had a fine mind, but one better suited for grand strategy than the day-to-day struggles that came with the center seat. Most would have seen the Academy as a step down, especially for a man in his thirties, and yet Pike had treated it as a promotion.

“He saw it as an opportunity,” Kirk had told Spock, years before, the first time they had spoken of it. “To him, the Academy was a quiet place outside of the line of fire, a place where he could take his time, set up his schemes, build alliances within the Admiralty core. And, more to the point, to sketch his vision for the Fleet through the bodies of those was training to serve its cause.”

“Is that how he won your loyalty?” Spock asked. “With his vision?”

The captain had lifted his glass, glinted at Spock over its edge. “Yes,” he said. “And I wasn’t the only one.” Kirk took a sip, let the liquor linger in his mouth a moment before he swallowed. “He’s a brilliant man, Spock. He can see the future. Komack and his ilk, they’re obsessed with the past.”

In the end, the consensus was that Pike was a radical choice, one that deeply unsettled the status quo.

Two years had passed with Pike as the Head of Operations. Uneasy years, in retrospect; a time when change was taking shape but had yet to bear full bloom, as those whom Pike had trained, whose nascent careers had been shaped by his hand, spread out into the Fleet, bearing his future on their backs.

And then, soon after Pike had appointed Kirk to the _Enterprise_ , word had come over subspace of the explosion at Fleet headquarters, followed by the terrible images of the Tipton building, smoldering, what had been the core of the high command reduced to fire and ash. Ten on the High Council dead, Admirals Flynn and Nogura, Pike’s strongest allies, among them, and Pike--Pike had been catastrophically injured, his spine cracked into pieces, his skin, his very DNA, so it was said, savaged by ketadrine-driven fire.

How fortunate, the official story went, that Komack had been off world on that day, meeting with the Vulcan General Staff on T’Khut; otherwise, the very Fleet itself might have collapsed, a snake struck off at the head. Spock did not believe this, no one really did, but belief was irrelevant; all that was required sufficient repetition to allow those who wished to believe the discursive cover to do so. Indeed, it had not taken long for rumors to circulate that Komack himself was involved in the attack, had arranged it, and when Pike disappeared from the medical facilities on Starbase I, one of the most secure facilities in the Empire, the Admiral’s hand had been all too apparent.

Kirk had taken it hard, the not knowing. Three weeks had passed with no word of Pike’s fate, and then ten, twenty, as Komack consolidated his power, and by the time Pike reemerged, his face almost unrecognizable but his spirit unbowed, his followers had been few and far between.

But in the few, there was Kirk, and where he went, there was always momentum.

It had started slowly at first: a rogue shuttlecraft here, a Scout-class ship there, and with the _Enterprise_ at its helm, the quiet resistance to Komack had grown louder and stronger, and as the second Romulan War raged on, devouring the Fleet’s assets, Komack had little time to devote to rooting out those who opposed him. It was a delicate, brutal dance, their resistance, one where outright rebellion would likely mean death, inglorious and forgettable, while being a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as Spock’s mother might have said, afforded ample opportunities to drive home a knife.

Oh, yes. Their opposition was well known. But the Admiral had not found a way to kill them, not yet, and so he had contented himself with striking at more proximate targets.

Their revenge, then, would be for Spock’s mother, too, for the horrors Komack had inflicted upon her. And what he had done to Spock’s father was no less than a debasement, a crime for which even the most terrible death would not be punishment enough.

On its face, then, the Admiral’s desire to see McCoy dead was a small thing, insignificant; a cruel whim among a hundred others, a thousand. But it was precisely that pettiness that rankled Spock: what was its purpose other than humiliation? A petty show of force that did not feed the Empire’s glory in any way. To deny him this would be a single stone cast in an ongoing battle; their defiance insignificant, too. But one rock among many could form a storm, a barrage that one day, Spock was certain, would subsume, and if this was to be his stone, seducing this doctor, assuaging his captain, then, he thought, so be it.

Three years, they had been waiting, wolves dancing with their knives. Three long, trying years.

“Where are you?” Kirk murmured, his mouth brushing Spock’s. “Come back to me, damn you. Get out of your head.”

“I am considering your request.”

The captain nipped at Spock’s chin and stroked a finger over his entrance, insistent, and then in. “Are you now. And what have you decided?”

“Yes,” Spock breathed, as if there were any ever question, any answer he could give Kirk, always and again, that did not begin and end with that word: _yes_.

As to how he would bring the doctor to the same conclusion, however, was, at that moment, far less clear.

 

____________________

 

He went to the doctor the next day, as alpha shift waned. Swept from the bridge with his personal guard on his heels and the captain’s eyes hot on his back.

“Remain here,” he told Stonn outside the doctor’s office. “Ensure that we are not disturbed.”

“Sir,” Stonn said, formal, as if he did not know that the sight of him alone would send most beings determinedly in the other direction.

To Spock’s surprise, the door was unlocked.

“Yes?” the doctor said vaguely, his face focused on a large PADD. “Chris, I thought I told you to leave me be.”

“Rest assured that Dr. Chapel took your instruction to heart,” Spock said, reveling in the look on McCoy’s face as it snapped to his: shock, a little fear, an immediate shade of defiance. “She was quite displeased by my insistence that our meeting was urgent.”

“Meeting? What the hell are you talking about?”

Spock took the chair in front of the doctor’s desk deliberately, as if he had every right to be there, as if this were his sanctum, not McCoy’s. “There is a matter we must discuss.”

“Oh, is there?” McCoy spat, tossing the PADD with a clatter, in a way that suggested he would have much preferred to hurl it at Spock’s head. “Well, then. Let the work of the MedBay be damned. Never mind healing the sick. What’s so important, then, _sir_?”

He was frightened. That much was evident, and Spock could not blame him. A private chat with the first officer, with the captain’s inamorata, was intimidating enough; that he had no idea why Spock wanted to speak with him served only to compound it.

But to his credit, McCoy was no coward. He met Spock’s gaze without blinking and he had made no move towards a weapon, though in truth, Spock doubted he had one at hand. A foolish absence on a ship such as this.

“I have an invitation to extend,” Spock said, without further preamble. “I would like you to join me for dinner.”

Whatever the doctor had been expecting, it was clearly not that. “Dinner,” he repeated. “You--you wanna break bread with me?”

“Yes,” Spock said. “In my quarters, this evening. 2100 hours. It is not an official function, so you may dress more--casually, if you like, though you are not required to do so.” He drew his eyes down McCoy’s face, past his open mouth, swept his chest and brought them back up to bear, let them grow somewhat heavy. “Whatever will make you feel most at ease.”

The doctor’s cheeks were red, flush roses that spread as Spock watched. Interesting. “I’m guessing that ‘invitation’ is another way of saying ‘order.’”

Spock’s voice was mild, almost kind. “It is not a request. But nor is it a command. Your actions are your choice, doctor.” He let his mouth rise, a careful turn of his lips. “Is this not always the case in the Empire?”

McCoy snorted, some of the tension in his body easing. “Yeah, sure it is. Right.”

Spock rose and moved around the desk, and on a whim, took a liberty: he cupped McCoy’s cheek, brazen, careful to school his shields, to keep the barrier between their minds intact. The doctor, he thought, was not displeasing to look upon, with his dark beard and agate eyes; especially now, with his uncertainty so apparent. “I assure you,” Spock said, “you have nothing to fear from me, McCoy. I wish only to seek your counsel in a setting more conducive to such discussions than this.”

To his surprise, the doctor did not pull away. Said: “As long as the captain doesn’t gut me for talking to you out of turn.”

“The captain is well aware of my plans. He has no objection.”

McCoy did flinch then and Spock let him go. “I suppose doesn’t matter if I do.”

“How can you object to that which you do not know?”

The doctor glared up at him and Spock could see it, the moment McCoy’s patience ran out. “2100 hours,” he said, stiff. “Fine. I’ll be there. Until then, if you’ll excuse me, Commander. I have work to do.”

Spock reached across the desk and picked up the abandoned PADD, slipped it back into the doctor’s hands. They were trembling. “See that you do. I shall be monitoring your progress.”

“Yeah,” the doctor muttered as Spock moved towards the door. “I bet you will.”

There were few aboard the _Enterprise_ who would have dared to speak to Spock in such a manner, few in the Empire, in fact, and there was a part of Spock that wanted to snarl, to spin around and catch McCoy by the throat, to squeeze and watch the life leak out of him. Of course there was; he was a Vulcan.

But he was half-human, too, and that part of his physiology had prevented him from making such rash decisions many, many times before, and here, it did so again.

He simply turned his head and said: “Good afternoon, doctor.”

If, out of the corner of his eye, he saw McCoy shudder, he chose not to comment upon it.

 

____________________

 

Privacy, Spock had learned long ago, was essential to a successful seduction.

Even those creatures who enjoyed being observed while in coitus were much less eager for others to see them emotionally vulnerable, awash in feelings that confused them, delighted them, made them feel good, and for Spock, such vulnerability was critical, for it made most beings particularly susceptible to the manipulations that lay at the heart of his seductions. However pleasant the sexual congress might be, in all its shapes, styles, and forms, for him, sex was never the endgame: it was a means to an end, a way of achieving a goal, of accomplishing something that would enrich his captain.

Carol had been different. With her, sex had been a means of destruction, a way of tearing down her station so that he might seize it as his own, for how could she belong to the captain if she was also fucking Spock?

It had been Kirk’s idea, his plan, his way of ridding himself of Carol in a manner far crueler than death.

“She’s an admiral’s daughter,” he’d said, his hand stretched in Spock’s hair, his cock deep in Spock’s throat. “Oh, fuck. _Fuck_. Yeah. Like that. It’s not as easy as saying ‘get the hell out of my sight.’”

Spock still dreamed of her, sometimes, of the cool slick of her cunt, the eagerness in her to be touched, to be pleased by her lover as Kirk once had done, had long ago stopped attempting. He dreamed of the sound of her voice around his name, crying out first in pleasure and then in shock, in terror, in pain as Kirk clutched her hair, yanked her off of Spock’s cock, dragged her across the room and tossed her in the corridor, unclothed and immediately disgraced.

“You are not,” Kirk had snarled, standing over her, repeating the ritual words at full volume before a sudden, silent crowd. “From this moment on, you are not.”

“Spock!” he had heard her call as Kirk stormed back into Spock’s quarters, stalked towards him, beaming with satisfaction and lust, as the doors closed: “Help me, Spock.”

He dreamed of her, yes, but he lost little sleep over Carol.

“I thought you slept with the captain,” McCoy said. “In all the ways that implies.”

He was hovering near the door, comforting himself with the possibility of escape. Predictably, he had not acquiesced to Spock’s sartorial suggestion; he stood before Spock, before the rich table Spock had laid, still in his uniform.

You are dressed, Spock thought, for the wrong kind of duty.

He did not say this aloud, for already he had determined that the doctor would not favorably respond to innuendo, to the wink of an eye. No, whatever choices McCoy made, they would be considered, careful, rather than a reaction to lust.

Thus, he had erred on the conservative side for his own attire, trading his tunic for a black shirt that hung loosely from his shoulders and yet emphasized his frame, while retaining his uniform trousers and boots. Attractive but unthreatening, he had thought, regarding himself in the mirror: more first officer than the captain’s inamorata, a mind in search of counsel, not a body in search of solace.

And yet still, McCoy’s eyes were lingering on him, reluctant moths gliding over a flame. It was, Spock thought, reaching for his wine glass, a promising sign.

“You are correct,” he said. “I share a bed with Kirk. But I am often in need of solitude, of a private space in which to think, so I retain this space, with the captain’s permission.”

“You could fit my cabin in here twice.” That tone again, deliberately abrasive, impertinent. “Seems like a hell of a lot of room for one person to only use every once and awhile.”

Spock shrugged. “Perhaps. But that is not my decision to make.” He gestured towards the small table, towards the empty chair at his side. “Come. Sit with me and partake.”

He led McCoy through the meal deftly, engaging the doctor in a discussion of his work, the puzzle of the Klingon plague he had been parsing all afternoon. There was an exquisite stew and warm, chewy bread, the Andorian wine that Spock favored, that loosened McCoy’s tongue, along with a sweet, delicate fruit. Each of these he and McCoy consumed in concert, in turn, and every few minutes that passed seemed to ease some of the doctor’s suspicion, his disquiet. Soon their plates were empty, the wine dwindling down to the last glass.

“Don’t tell me you invited me up here just for coffee and conversation, Commander.”

“Doctor?”

McCoy set down his wine and gave Spock his full attention. “You said you needed my counsel, and yet you’ve not asked for it all evening. I can’t help but suspect your motives then, can I?”

Spock mirrored his movement, then steepled his fingers. Regarded the doctor carefully. “The captain is concerned for your safety.”

Something in the doctor’s face stiffened. “Is he now? Well, that’s awful sweet of him.”

“As am I,” Spock said. “Hence my need for your advice.”

McCoy spread his arms, leaned back in his chair. “That makes no goddamn sense, but here I am. Ask away.”

“I am uncertain how to convince you to take this particular threat seriously.”

“Hmm,” McCoy said. “Does this sudden, renewed interest in my hide happen to have anything to with our run in with Captain Mitchell last week, about my suggestion that the captain deny him some new chew toys?” Spock raised an eyebrow and the doctor laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “I may not be at the center of things, Spock, but I do have two ears. And a few friends who keep me in the loop, on occasion. Anyway, it’s no secret those two hate each other.”

Spock tipped his head. “A hyperbolic assessment, doctor, but only just. And yes, you are correct: Captain Mitchell lies at the center of our captain’s concern. He has made his displeasure known to Admiral Komack, and Kirk has been ordered to cancel your commission, seize your credits, and leave you at the mercy of the nearest starbase, once we have completed this patrol.”

The doctor paled. “Jesus. Well. They don’t fuck around, do they?”

“They do not.” Spock sat back. “You can understand, then, why the captain is concerned. And why he wishes to extend to you his personal protection.”

He let that statement hang in the air, watched the realization creep up over the doctor’s face.

“His personal--?” McCoy repeated. “Oh god. No, Spock. _No_. I won’t do it. I’m not swearing allegiance to that lunatic.”

Spock’s eyes narrowed. “Doctor, I will allow such a transgression only once. The captain is--”

“Fine, sorry, fine. He’s not a lunatic. But he’s a _force_ , Spock. He’s a known fucking quantity in the Empire who picks fights in three quadrants on any given day. Hell, half the Admiralty wants to gut him on sight! I don’t want to be associated with any of that, any more than I have to be.”

“You serve at his leisure.”

“Serving under him is one thing. Being allied with him is a whole fucking, horrible other. I’d have thought you knew that better than anybody. I heard what Komack did to your family, to your father.”

The call of his mother’s mind, terrified, the images he’d been sent of Sarek, bound and broken, his head hanging slack, his body dumped at the heart of ShiKahr, splayed on the steps of the Vulcan War College. The awful silence in Spock’s thoughts where his father should have been, the absence of his steady, formidable voice. And his mother, she was still--

McCoy’s hand on his arm. “Goddamn it, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No,” Spock said, grief and fury making the word tight, “but your point is well-taken. What the captain offers is an alliance, not a guarantee.”

The doctor squeezed his arm and sat back, let his head hang in shadow. “So even if I align myself with him and betray the few shreds of principle I’ve managed to hang onto--which I know you don’t give a shit about, but which are fundamental to me--Mitchell or this Komack could still send somebody to murder me in some especially unpleasant way. You see my conundrum, Commander.”

“Your compassion is out of place within the Empire, doctor, much less within the Fleet,” Spock said, impatient. “The captain is offering you a way of holding on to it for at least a little longer than you would be able to on your own.”

McCoy chuckled, ran a hand through his hair. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

For a moment, his face softened, and Spock caught a glimpse of what McCoy must have looked like before: before he was drafted, before he had been torn unwilling from one life and installed in another at the point of a blade. All across the Empire, medical facilities were stretched thin, had been since the second Romulan war had begun to bleed into the highly-populated Gamma sector. Many civilian hospitals were short-staffed, their facilities stripped to the bone, but the Fleet’s needs were preeminent, always, and in these times, only the very rare ship’s surgeon joined the Fleet by choice.

McCoy, Spock thought, had been very lucky to be assigned to the _Enterprise_ , where his skills mattered more to the captain than his political bent.

He wondered if the doctor often thought of his family. A daughter, his records had said. A wife, another doctor, who had been shipped directly to the front lines.

Yes, McCoy had been fortunate.

Something stirred in his side, a fast pulse of his heart, and he followed it, stretched a hand out and touched the doctor’s knee, traced its turn with his fingers. “My captain is not asking you to change who you are,” he said. “Indeed, it is your uniqueness which makes him want to protect you. You have served him very, very well, Doctor McCoy.”

McCoy’s eyes were startling, rough edges glinting with green. “So this is his way of showing his gratitude, is that it? Sending you to make the pitch, rather than putting the question to me himself?”

“Something like that.”

McCoy smiled, this soft bitter thing, and then he closed his hand over Spock’s, his palm a cool shock. “I see. And are you to be my prize for loyalty, Commander Spock?”

Spock took a breath. He himself was the seducer, he reminded himself; the course of action was his to choose. And yet--and yet it was he who trembled before McCoy’s touch, as the doctor’s fingers found his thigh and climbed it, his eyes firm on Spock’s face.

“Do you require an additional incentive?” Spock heard himself say, his voice unexpectedly tight. “I would have thought the prospect of retaining your life was sufficient.”

“What if I did?” McCoy said. He spread his hand wide, stroked his thumb inside of Spock's thigh. “Would the captain let me have you?”

Spock fought to keep his voice steady. “If that is what was required.”

McCoy made a small, considering sound. “Huh.”

In one breath, they were seated apart, parallel; in the next, the doctor was on his knees, both hands braced on Spock’s thighs, his breath teasing the strained catch of Spock’s trousers.

Central to the art of seduction, in Spock’s mind, was adaptability. In this way, it was not unlike chess: the moves ahead may seem apparently, set out in a logical line, but when one’s opponent makes a shift unexpected, moves a rook instead of a knight, then one’s plans must be set aside and a new way forward found. To fight McCoy, to push him away and force him to conform to Spock’s plan--one he had imagined ending in shouted invectives, perhaps, or dishes thrown, or with the doctor stretched over the table, his body trembling at Spock licked at its center--would have been counterproductive. Better to embrace this new path and see where it led.

He turned his hands in McCoy’s hair, careful, and the doctor hummed pleasantly in response, gave Spock the full width of his tongue, dragging it from root to tip as his fingers traced the outline of Spock’s cock.

“Tell me,” he murmured, pressing the words into fabric, teasing Spock’s overhead flesh. “Are you getting hard for me because it’s required, Commander? You starting to drip because it’s your duty, or because you wanna come down my throat?” The sharp edges were gone from his voice, replaced by a heated drawl that made each word a caress. “Or maybe you’d rather come on my face. Mark me up for yourself. Make me wear your sign instead of your captain’s, huh?”

Spock was fully hard now, his trousers so tight it was almost painful, and he could smell his own slick, could feel it seeping towards McCoy’s mouth. “Yes. _Yes_ , doctor. If that is what you wish.”

McCoy opened his mouth wide, sucked swift at the head, and Spock swore, his hand turning fist. A whisper: “Better question: what is it you want from me?”

Spock’s head fell back and he hitched his hips, pressed himself against McCoy’s face, seeking more. “I told you, the captain wants--”

The doctor’s teeth found the inside of Spock’s thigh, closed firm enough to make Spock whimper. “That’s not what I asked you,” he said. “Maybe you didn’t hear me.”

“I--” Spock began, but then McCoy’s fingers were prying him open, tugging him out, catching Spock's cock in a coil, his face alight with a dark kind of joy.

“I asked you what you wanted, Commander. Is it this?” He gave a long, low stroke, then another, and Spock’s head fell back, hard, his hands scrabbling at the doctor’s shoulders.

“Yes,” Spock said, in Standard, in Vulcan. “Oh, yes.”

McCoy made a hot, soft sound. “Yeah, well. Too goddamn bad.”

“What?”

Then the doctor’s touch slipped away and he stood, he was standing, before Spock, his cheeks flushed under his beard. “You tell your captain that it’s gonna take more than your cock to convince me to play along with his bullshit.”

Spock’s mind was askew, his body still tilted towards ready. “Doctor, you do not--”

McCoy shoved his hands back through his hair and for the first time all night, he looked vaguely out of control. “I _do_ , thank you, Commander. I know a honey trap when I see one, all right? Frankly, I can’t believe you two thought you could buy my loyalty with a good fuck.” He leered at Spock, looked pointedly between his legs. “No doubt it would a good one though, huh? God, look at you. No wonder the captain keeps you in his bed.”

“Do not speak of that which does not concern you,” Spock snarled.

“Doesn’t concern me? Well fuck, Spock. Fuck you. And you tell your captain, you tell him--” McCoy stopped. He clasped his hands in front of him and took a deep, angry breath. “You tell him I’ll think about his offer. I will. And if I require any additional incentives, he’ll be the first to know.”

He flew from Spock’s sight, through the doors and into the corridor, and when Spock reached out, his limbs heavy, soporific, his hands caught only the air where the doctor had been.

What in the Watcher’s name had he just allowed to transpire? 

He tried to think but his body was too loud, the pound of his blood, the shadows of McCoy’s touches, his tongue, were too much to ignore. So he touched himself, stroked the slick McCoy had dragged from him, and brought himself off at the table, splattered his fine tunic with a roar as he imagined McCoy’s beard smeared with his spend, those eyes finding his, angry, triumphant.

When he could, he stood and set about changing his attire, slipping back into a sense of self with which he was more familiar, the one who would move silent through the halls, towards his captain, their quarters, who would command respect and careful distance from all those that he passed.

Who had he been with McCoy? A king unsettled by a pawn? A seducer found out at his own game? Strange, it had been, to be taken off guard so completely. So very strange.

He stared at himself in the mirror as he adjusted his uniform tunic, traced the flush that still hung in his cheeks, haunted the tips of his ears. Saw only Spock staring back.

The captain would sense his disquiet, perhaps even the last echoes of his arousal, and that soothed him. If he was uncertain of himself--or had been, beneath the barrage of McCoy’s tongue--Kirk never was, never would be.

Still.

Kirk’s instincts had been more right than he knew: McCoy would be an extraordinary asset. Perhaps a trickier creature, however, than either of them had anticipated.

He allowed his reflection to smile, watched it turn its mouth around the word: “Fascinating.” 


	2. Chapter 2

Leonard McCoy sat on his bed with his head in his hands and waited for the world to disappear. It never did.

Two years he’d been trying to will himself home, the Empire into ashes, his daughter back into his arms. The first few months aboard the _Enterprise_ , while M’Benga had still be in charge of MedBay, he’d prayed for a lot worse. One night, after he’d been forced to watch his boss sew a random crewman up with needles and thread and no anesthetic ‘just to see what would happen,’ he’d knicked a hypospray of Cordrazine from the lab and come within five minutes of jamming the thing into his neck and giving it all up for good.

But he’d seen Jo’s face then, as he did every damn time he’d closed his eyes, her face awash in tears, in unmistakable fear, her mouth agape as the Empire goons lifted him bodily and dragged him off the sidewalk, no warning, no summons. The Fleet required his services and so he would go with them now, one of the extraction cops had said, or they would put a disrupter under his chin and spread him all over the sidewalk, all over his daughter, and you don’t want that, Doctor McCoy, do you?

No, he’d said, no, and he’d let himself be taken away, had made himself keep his eye on Joanna as long as he could. She’d only been 10, for god’s sakes, had already spent a year without her mother, but the Empire didn’t care. Probably took some sadistic pleasure in it, in fact. He wouldn’t put it past them.

He wouldn’t put anything past them, now.

So he’d seen Jo’s face as he sat on the edge of bed clutching Cordrazine and all at once, he was angry, filled with it: goddamn it, he wanted to _live_. Why should he die while the Empire survived, sailed along scot free with nobody willing to stand up to their shit, to hold them accountable for all the evil they’d done in the name of security and profit and interplanetary strength.

Fear, is what it was. That’s what drove them. He’d be damned if he’d live that way, too.

He’d sent the hypo down the refuse shoot and made a promise to himself, to Joanna: he’d find a way out of this, off this ship, somehow, and get out of this godforsaken dark desert. He’d find his way home or he’d die in the trying.

Not long after, M’Benga had said the wrong thing to Spock during a physical and ended up with a dagger in his throat, gasping and thrashing in the middle of MedBay as Kirk twisted the knife. It was the first time McCoy had ever watched a man die and not felt sickened; instead, he’d felt...satisfaction. He wasn't sure what to think about that.

The captain had stepped over M’Benga’s still-twitching corpse and looked McCoy straight in the eye, said: “You’re McCoy, right?”

Leonard tensed. It was hard not to when his boss’ blood was fresh on the captain’s hands. And how the hell did the man know his name? “Yes, sir.”

Kirk nodded, shot a backwards glance at M’Benga. “See that this mess is cleaned up, CMO. And, oh--make sure I get back my knife.”

“Yes, sir,” McCoy said again, doing his damndest not to look terrified. “Right away.”

The captain had smiled then--not the shark-toothed grin he shot over the comms, daring anybody to doubt him, even in the midst of the worst firefight, but something that made him look almost human. “Knew I could count on you,” he said, clapping a bloody hand on McCoy’s shoulder. “You and me, we’re going to get along just fine.”

And the strange thing was: they had.

Turned out M’Benga had made a lot of noise on the ship, had caused trouble for Kirk in more ways than one before he’d come face to face with that dagger. McCoy, by contrast, ruffled no feathers. He had no interest in the petty, violent squabbles that characterized the lives of most of the ship’s officers; he kept his head down and he got the job done and he kept people alive, including the captain, who was really, really good at pissing other people off, aliens and Empire alike.

Kirk approved of such behavior, it seemed.

Plus, less than a month into his new position, he’d already saved Kirk’s life twice, once on an away mission when he’d been poisoned and once after one of Sulu’s men had taken advantage of a firefight and sliced the captain open on the bridge, a brutal blade that just missed the heart.

Spock had come by later, after the attacking Zeon ships had been vanquished, after McCoy had poured Kirk’s blood back into his body, practically, and hovered silent in the doorway of the captain’s private bay, his eyes unfathomable and black.

“When he awakens,” Spock had said, “tell him that the would-be assassin is dead. I ripped the man’s lungs from his chest while he still lived.”

McCoy focused on his scanner, did not shudder. “I’ll tell him.”

He heard Spock edge into the room, felt him stop at the foot of the biobed. “And I have saved Sulu for you, beloved,” Spock said, no longer addressing McCoy. “He is in the sensory deprivation chamber and will remain there until you are well enough to take your revenge.”

The words were, frankly, terrifying, but there was a softness in Spock’s tone that surprised him. He looked up from the scanner and saw Spock’s hand on the covers, clutching the captain’s ankle beneath the sheet, tight, and all at once he remembered the look on Kirk’s face when he’d slammed the knife into M’Benga’s throat, the sound of his voice, hissing: “He is not yours. You have no right.” My god, he thought, no wonder these two were so fucking fearsome: they really did care for each other.

He’d heard stories about Carol Marcus, the captain’s inamorata before Spock, back on the _Farragut_ , heard the rumours that her supposed betrayal of Kirk had been a set-up, a public ruse designed to install Spock permanently into the captain’s bed. However it’d come about, though, the strength of their partnership was undeniable; their reputation for efficient brutality and profit on the _Farragut_ had won them the _Enterprise_ , had quickly transformed this ship into one of the most formidable--and profitable--into the fleet.

Still, McCoy knew, being the captain’s inamorta, for all its apparent intimacy, was usually about status, not affection, and he’d assumed Kirk and Spock were no different, that their partnership was but a bloody fucking business designed to enrich their careers. And perhaps it was. But as he watched Spock’s hand on his captain, the commander’s thumb sweeping the coverlet, fear bleeding through his hard features as he watched Kirk breathe, there was no mistaking that there was more to it, too.

He filed that information away and kept his voice curt. “I’ll call you when he’s conscious, sir.”

Spock nodded, his eyes still on the captain. “Yes,” he said from far away. “Do that.”

Before last night, that’d been the longest conversation they’d had, he and Spock, in the two years that he’d been aboard. And now--

He pushed up from the bed and padded to his closet of a washroom, woke up the sensors of his sonic and climbed in, doing his best not to think of last night, of the singe of Spock’s hands in his hair, the heat of him swelling willing under McCoy’s tongue, the smell of his slick, strange spice and burnt sand.

He didn’t know what had possessed him to touch Spock in the first place, to give into an impulse that bordered on suicidal. Maybe, he thought, hazy, waving the sonic’s waves warm, some part of him still wanted to die. Maybe that was it.

No.

No, there had been something in his office, when Spock had swept in, had put his hand on McCoy’s face like he had every right--something in the press of Spock’s fingers that made McCoy think that he might welcome such a gesture in return.

He thought of Spock’s palm, hard and hot, and stroked himself with a sigh, wished there were water to ease the slide. Still, the waves were making his whole body tingle and when he tipped his head back against the wall, he imagined he could hear Spock’s voice in his ear, throaty and frayed, murmuring: _Yes, yes_. Gods, he’d gotten so hard just from teasing Spock, testing how far he could push, how much he’d be allowed to take and it’d been a long time since he’d felt like that, fearless, high on the sound of Spock’s heart, the proof of his desire. He’d rushed back to his cabin and not stroked his cock, not, downed three fingers of terrible brandy and willed his eyes to close, his mind to sleep against the what might have beens, but now, he was tuned back into that feeling, could almost taste Spock again, heady and wet, and he came like the pleasure was being wrung out him, like he was supposed to savor it, hold it on his tongue and taste every shiver, every pulse.

In the mirror, after, he saw an echo of Spock, his head thrown back, the green flush on his throat. The captain’s inamorata, dispatched, it seemed, to persuade him, to lure him once and for all to Kirk’s side, allied as he had never been, as he’d promised himself he never would be.

_I’m a part of this now_ , he’d told himself a thousand times since the doors to the Empire shuttle closed and yanked him out of his old life, away from his daughter, up into the darkness. _And that can’t be helped. But I will not be party to it, goddamn it. I won’t._

But now, there was possibility, opportunity that he’d never considered before, never even thought possible.

Maybe, he thought as he dressed, as he combed a hand through his hair and reached for his boots, aligning himself with Kirk and Spock offered him the best chance of not only surviving, but of escaping, breaking free from the Empire and finding some way to get back home.

He’d be party to them in name only. Well. In deed too, perhaps, but not in heart.

He tied on his sash and moved into the corridor, not as at war with himself as he would’ve liked.

Still, he told himself as he shouldered into MedBay, into the small part of the universe that he could control, it wasn’t a decision he could make lightly. There was so much about the situation that he didn’t understand--like why now? Why him? Those who’d sworn direct allegiance to the captain, by invitation only, were few and far between: Spock, of course; Moreau, in Engineering; Uhura, the head of Security; Illya, the Chief Navigator; and his personal bodyguards. That was it. Eight people on a ship of 400. True, it was a status that many aspired to--Christine Chapel, McCoy’s head of surgery, for one, and the beanpole Russian kid who could talk to torpedoes--but the gods knew Leonard never had. For all his good looks and flypaper charm, Kirk was a dangerous son-of-a-bitch. Everybody knew that; hell, the whole galaxy did. Why anybody would want to be that close to crazy, McCoy couldn’t figure.

Yeah, there was the aura of success, the chance that Kirk’s achievements, his reputation, his name would rub off on those close to him. But being part of his inner circle also put you in permanent striking distance of his temper; he had no qualms about chucking beings into the booth, no matter their rank. After that incident on the bridge, when he’d been stabbed by one of Sulu’s goons, the captain had sent Uhura to the booth. Had ordered her own people to strip her down and throw her in and he’d had all 30 minutes of her session broadcast shipwide, a decision McCoy had found incomprehensible.

“All he’s doing is undermining her authority,” he’d fumed, pacing the length of Christine’s tiny office and back. “How the hell can he expect her to keep order in the ranks when he’s humiliated her like this? Jesus.”

Chapel looked away from the viewscreen where Uhura was writhing. Christine’s face was flushed, her gaze sloe-eyed, and Leonard had the distinct, disturbing impression that she was aroused. “Fuck, you really don’t get it, do you?” she said, in that patient tone, _what the fuck is wrong with you_ tone she’d honed just for him. “The captain’s not undermining her authority. He’s reinforcing his own. There’s a difference.”

“No, there’s--”

Christine made a face. “Why do you think the captain put her in there and not one of her people, hmm? Uhura wasn’t on the bridge when Kirk was cut. Two of her junior officers were. But they’re not in there, are they? Other captains would have had she and her whole team killed for screwing up so fucking royally, Len. But not Kirk. He’s making a point.”

“What, that he’s a sadistic bastard? Yeah, I got that.”

She chuckled. “You shouldn’t say shit like that, even to me. The walls have ears.”

All of a sudden, the horrible screech of the booth ceased, and Uhura slumped forward, her palms pressed to the transparent aluminum. Every part of her was trembling, her lovely face twisted in knots of terror and pain.

“Look,” Christine said softly. “Here he comes.”

Kirk slipped onto the screen, a blanket in his hands. He went to the door of the booth, opened it, wrapped the blanket around Uhura’s body and drew her into his arms. It wasn’t sexual, their embrace; it wasn’t even kind. It was--territorial.

“Now her people know that she’ll take the bullet for them: no complaints, no bargaining.” Chapel’s voice was tinged with awe. “She knew she deserved it, her whole team did. But she’s the one who bore it, for them. And he’s the one who made her take it.” She gave McCoy a hot smile, one that made his skin crawl. “Don’t you see? It means that nobody’s immune from the booth on the _Enterprise_. Not even his officers, or his favorites. He’ll hold each of us accountable for our actions, if need be. Not arbitrarily, or because he gets off on it, but because we’ve done something wrong, something that hurts this ship.” Her smile widened. “You don’t realize how rare a thing that kind of parity is in the Fleet, Len. Kirk is one of a kind.”

_A one of a kind lunatic_ , McCoy thought, but had enough sense not to say.

But perhaps, as the events of the last week or so suggested, Chris was right. First the colonists, then this missive sent via Spock. Maybe there was more to the man than it seemed.

It was in the back of his mind all day, the weight of all those unknowns, how much he didn’t know about the man in the center seat. He tried his best to focus on what he could understand, what he could actually fix: the effects of a small fire in Engineering, for example, the cluster of the Aldeberan clap that was raging though Security. Chris was no help; she got into a shouting match with Nurse Decker that ended with the two of them fucking in the dispensary, hundreds of precious hypocaps put in peril by Christine’s habit of using sex as a management tool. He didn’t like it, but it hadn’t cost him any personnel yet; if anything, it seemed to help with retention. And spunk was a hell of a lot easier to clean up than blood.

And then there were still the three dozen Mlladens to attend to, saved from the ruins of their tiny ocean idyll, and Captain Mitchell, true, but it’d have been a stretch to say they were in good shape. Oh, sure, only few of them were still bleeding; most everybody with physical injuries had been healed. But they were shell-shocked, all of them, traumatized by the slaughter they’d witnessed--perpetrated by Klingon pirates? Raiders? Who knew? The ship’s linguistic banks were still chewing on the Mlla tongue, limiting McCoy’s interactions with them to hand gestures and facial expressions, and all of that, coupled with living in close quarters in half-empty cargo bay was proving no boon their collective mental health, either.

He’d bugged the captain about it a few days ago, to no goddamn avail.

“I said you could keep them,” Kirk had said. “That’s as far as my promises go.”

“Sir, I appreciate that, but these people need beds. They need routine. They need a semblance of regular life, they--”

Kirk crossed his arms, his expression suddenly blank. “I’ve done them a great service, McCoy, letting them onboard this ship at all.”

McCoy sat up a little straighter in his chair, leaned across the briefing room table. “Don’t we have a slew of open quarters on P deck?”

“Four is hardly a slew,” Kirk said, “and they aren’t empty; they’re designated for Commander Uhura’s use, as she sees fit.” His eyes narrowed, icicles. “And I thought you were a doctor, not my quartermaster. What business is it of yours what I do with my ship?”

McCoy got the message, loud and clear: he’d pushed his luck far enough for one day. “My apologies, sir. Please forgive my overzealousness.”

“Mmmmm. See that it doesn’t happen again.”

“Yes, captain.”

Kirk tilted his head, and in an instant, his expression was sunny again, his grin easy and confident. “Anyway, we’ll be at Starbase XI in a day or so. 48 hours of rough living never hurt anybody, McCoy.” He slapped the table and rose. “Tell them they’ll soon be sitting pretty in the palm of the Empire. Nobody’s gonna fucking ambush them on a starbase.”

But then Mitchell had shown up at Starbase XI with the _Intrepid_ , guns bristling, demanding that Kirk hand the colonists over to him, for no goddamn good reason that McCoy could see.

“There isn’t one,” the captain had said, his eyes locked on the viewscreen, on the muted image of Captain Mitchell’s cruel, handsome face. “Gary just lives to be a pain in my ass.”

“What does he want with them?”

“Oh,” Kirk said, nonchalant, “he’ll probably toss them out an airlock. Or gut them in the mess hall. I don’t know.”

McCoy stared at him, horrified. “Captain, we can’t--!”

The captain’s eyes snapped to his. “I can do whatever the fuck I want, mister. But just out of curiosity, what would you recommend?”

Suddenly, the whole bridge was fixed on him: Illya at Navigation, the Russian boy at tactical, the phalanx of security guards, even Commander Spock, all of them bored in on him like a bug under glass. He had strangest impression that Mitchell’s eyes were on him, too. He did his best not to flinch. This was the first time he’d been invited to the bridge and it was starting to look like it was going to be the last. Shit, he thought. Well, what the hell. Might as well go down fighting.

“Don’t hand them over,” he said. “Captain, please. We don’t owe them much, but they’re under your protection, aren’t they? They’re onboard your ship.”

“True.”

McCoy gripped the side of the captain’s chair. “Then let them stay here, for now. Let them keep living. Please.”

Kirk’s eyes swept over him, as if he were seeing McCoy for the first time. “Impressively impassioned, doctor. I’m inclined to agree.”

“Are you? I mean, you are,” McCoy said, and he realized was babbling. “Good. Thank you.”

The captain had waved a hand, imperious. “Now get the fuck off my bridge and go care for your pets.”

It was a good outcome, the right one, but the practical realities of the colonists’ survival had become increasingly difficult. He’d requisitioned a couple of field showers and had them installed in the bay, made sure everybody had clean clothes, but the bay wasn’t a place anybody would want to call home. It was cold and the sleeping bags were wearing thin and there wasn’t a food slot, so they only got to eat when somebody from Provisions remembered to get off their ass and feed them.

McCoy’s daily visits, then, had become less about providing medical care and more about being harangued.

Still, he thought, nodding sympathetic as a father pointed to himself, to his child, curled sad and sleeping on the deck, and back, these people were still alive because of him, and if that meant he had to get bitched at over shit he couldn’t control, then fine.

All together, it made for a hell of a morning.

The afternoon wasn’t so peachy, either.

“When will my people be returning to work?” Chief Engineer Moreau asked, glaring at him from his terminal. “I need them down here immediately. They must answer for their mistake. We almost lost half a nacelle because of their carelessness.”

“Ma’am,” McCoy said, doing his best to keep his face calm, “one of ‘em has third-degree burns over 50% of their body, and one is looking at more like 75%. It’s gonna be two or three days at least.”

Moreau leaned into the oculus, her dark hair bumping the lens. “ _No_. That’s wholly unacceptable.”

“I can’t make their bodies heal any faster than that, Chief. Believe me, I wish I could; I’m afraid your men will be terrible pain until the pain medication catches up to them.”

The look on the engineer’s face changed, the stars popping out after a storm. “Excellent!” Moreau said, a great, beautiful smile. “Why didn’t you say so before? Decrease their medication to minimal levels and keep them there as long as you like.”

“As long as I--?” But he was talking to static.

Yet another reason to hate the Empire: it didn’t matter that he was the doctor, that she was an engineer; in matters of personal discipline, no matter how tangentially related, each section chief could overrule him.

It didn’t happen often--Kirk had little tolerance for casual sadism that interfered with the operation of his ship--and for a moment, McCoy was tempted to call the bridge, to ask the captain to deep six Moreau’s order. But doing so would put him on the Chief’s shit list, which was no good place to be, clearly, and anyway, how the fuck would she know if he didn’t follow her instructions to the letter? She liked to swing her weight around, sure, but she didn’t have eyes everywhere. Hell, she was no Uhura. His mouth twisted. No Spock.

Better to smile and nod, then, to acquiesce on the surface and keep doing what he thought was right.

He gave the crewmen, Scotty and Keenser, a full dose of Dycoline himself, watched the rictus ease from their bodies, their twisted burned flesh, and tuned the burn fields to the highest heal rate he could.

Fuck you, Moreau, he thought, tossing the hypocaps in the refuse shoot. And the exploding nacelle you rode in on.

He looked back at the men, at the computers struggling to get their vitals in line, and it catalyzed in that moment: here, in MedBay, he was only one man. He could do some good, now and then, like keeping innocents out of Captain Mitchell’s bloody hands, like ensuring the slings and arrows of the officers’ compulsions didn’t kill more crew than did the Klingons. But my god, he thought, ducking back into his office, biocoding the door, falling into his chair, what he could accomplish with the weight of the captain behind him, his ship--

_His weapons_ , some part of him whispered, _including his fiercest: Spock_.

How many lives could he save, or extend, or at least make more bearable in the midst of this nightmare with the captain’s symbol on his arm, with the _Enterprise_ behind him, with Spock at his side?

A whole hell of a lot.

Or was Spock’s receptiveness just a temporary measure, a sweet trap meant solely to lure him in? It hadn’t looked like it, hadn’t felt like it the night before, with Spock wet and ready in his fist, but who the fuck knew with these two? He wouldn’t put it put past the Commander to be able to fake it, to lie back and think of his captain when he had to.

But what Kirk and Spock were offering was the best angle open to him at the moment, he told himself, the best he’d glimpsed in two terrible years and damn if he wasn’t gonna try and play this hand to the hilt.

He reached across his desk and hit the intercom. “Commander Spock,” he said.

It took the computer a moment to locate him. Then his voice, cool, the sounds of the bridge: “Yes, doctor?”

McCoy sat back, his eyes wide open.

“Spock,” he said. “We need to talk.”

He could hear the man’s eyebrow lift. “Is that so.”

“My quarters, half an hour. If that’s convenient.”

“Yes,” the commander said after a moment. “As you wish.”

“I want to be clear about something,” McCoy said as soon as the doors closed, as soon as Spock’s shadow settled across the floor.

“What is that?”

"There’s a hell of a lot I don’t know about your captain, Spock, and so any answer I give you, any decision I may make, will be based on faith.”

“I do not understand.”

McCoy sat back on the bed, his arms pitched behind him. “ _Faith_ , Commander. In you, in your word. In what you tell me about him.”

Spock moved the two steps from the door to the edge of McCoy’s sleeping room. No pretty clothes tonight, McCoy noticed; he’d come straight from the bridge. A pity. “Surely the captain is not an unknown quantity to you,” Spock said. “As I recall, you have formed some opinion of him, however erroneous.”

“Exactly!” McCoy said. “Erroneous. Thus, I have to rely on what you tell me about him, don’t I?”

The Vulcan’s face creased. “Your speech is bordering on nonsensical.”

McCoy waved the words away. “Look, let’s say I agree to this proposition. I’d have to take your word that he’d follow through on his end of the agreement. I mean, he’s not here to speak for himself and I’m not sure I’d trust what he said anyway. I may have my doubts about him, but you don’t, do you?”

“No. If you swear allegiance to him, he would in effect do the same for you. But, to be clear, the captain would not be not content with a mere sign of your loyalty. Such an oath to him is not a matter of semantics, of vows blithely spoken. He wants that which it would signify. He wants you.”

“And what about you?” McCoy said, with an ease he did not fucking feel. “What do you want?”

He felt Spock’s gaze sweep over him, take in his casual sprawl on the neat, narrow bed. “You did ask me to consider that.”

“Yeah, I did.” They looked at each other for a moment. The commander was stich-perfect, not a wrinkle in sight, even after eight hours on duty, and yet there was something in his face, an uncertainty, that made him look like he was awash, out to sea without a map. Ah, McCoy felt a little stir of pride. I’ve caught him off guard, he thought. Good. Let’s see how much further off the rails we can go.

He slapped on a smile. “Spock,” he said. “Show me.”

“Show you?”

McCoy tugged off his tunic, tossed it to the corners of the room. “Yeah,” he said. “Show me where this sign of your captain’s would go on my skin. Hypothetically.”

Spock’s mouth turned up and he moved to the bed, loomed over McCoy, that little curve still firmly in place. “Here,” he said, his fingers brushing McCoy’s skin briefly. “Just below the shoulder, on the side of the bicep.”

“Hmm,” McCoy said, aping thoughtful. “Can I see yours?”

That earned him an eyebrow. “Doctor?”

It’d been a long time since he’d actively campaigned to get laid, and half-past never since he’d done it with some objective in mind other than a good time. He was playing it by ear, basically, sketching a song and watching Spock to see what notes he liked, what bars he clung to, and for all his rank and occasion to power, Spock seemed to like being led. Fine. McCoy could work with that.

He leaned back on his hands, gave the Vulcan a wide, innocent grin. “Your mark, Commander. May I see it? Or is it a private kinda thing?”

Spock hesitated, but only for a moment. “It is designed to be public.”

McCoy gestured at his long sleeves. “Yeah, but you hardly dress to show it off, do you?”

Those who swore loyalty to Kirk traditionally wore tunics with no sleeves, like the captain’s own, cut close to the body and far more aesthetic than practical. All except Spock.

Spock reached for his collar, for the catch of his tunic. “I do not have to,” he said, a little salty. “My position is very well known.”

“That it is, Spock,” McCoy said. “That it is.”

The commander opened his tunic, his expression unreadable, and when he turned to set it aside, McCoy caught sight of his back.

“Jesus,” McCoy breathed. “Spock. They’re gorgeous.”

The Vulcan’s flesh was awash in color, with dozens of intricate patterns flowing from the top of his spine to the base, across the roads of his ribs and over the curve of his shoulders. Spock sat next to him and twisted a little, gave McCoy a look that read straight-up coy. “You may regard them more closely, if you wish.”

“Thank you.”

On Spock’s skin he traced a flock of winged creatures, the flash of a lirpa. Reds and golds and black, the sign of the Watcher, the ruins of Mount Selaya. He recognized Vulcan script along Spock’s ribs, something that he thought might be Romulan. A Deltan curse, a scrap of Standard: _Always shall be_.

He stroked the words, the lines of language that held in Spock’s breath, that spoke of his heart, and Spock hummed, leaned into his hand. McCoy wasn't sure he knew he was doing it.

“The captain’s mark may be public, but these things are private, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

McCoy laid his mouth over one line, then the next, drawing a startled sound from Spock. “How long have you had them?”

Spock's voice was pleasantly strained. “Some, since I was very young. Others are quite new.”

“Hmmm.” McCoy raised his head, bit gently at the back of Spock’s neck. “I don’t have any tattoos yet, you know. The captain’s would be my first.”

A sharp intake of breath. “I see.”

He leaned into Spock’s body, pressed his chest to the wind of Spock’s spine. Whispered: “I would want you to do it. Lay his lines into my skin.”

“Yes,” Spock murmured. “I would.”

“Would it hurt?”

“If you wish.”

McCoy chuckled, dropped the sound in Spock’s ear. “I do not wish, thanks.”

Spock shifted, lifted a hand and caught the back of McCoy’s neck. “Then I will ensure it does not.” He turned his head until his mouth was flush with McCoy’s cheek. “I have no desire to hurt you, doctor.”

“No?”

“No,” Spock said. “I want to please you.”

“Why?” McCoy said, a little more barbed than he meant to.

“You have been speaking in hypotheticals, doctor, have you not?” A smile. “I have yet to hear you say yes.”

McCoy suppressed his own grin. _Gotcha_. “And you think pleasing me is gonna change that, huh?”

Spock made a low, hungry noise. “I think that you have shown yourself to be amenable to such efforts.”

“Have I?”

“Mmmmm.” Long fingers on his side, creeping, slipping under his waistband. “You were aroused when you left me last night.”

McCoy tipped his head, found the edge of Spock’s mouth with his own. “Yes.”

A whisper: “You left me aching.”

_Jesus_. “I know.”

Spock kissed him, this long, lingering thing that stopped McCoy’s breath. “You are very, very fortunate, doctor, that I have no intention of doing the same.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, I remix the meaning of _ashayam_ because it pleased me (and Spock) to do so.

The first time Spock came beneath McCoy’s hands, the doctor was deep in his throat, his nails cutting into Spock’s shoulders.

“Oh fuck,” McCoy said, the words barely coherent. “Spock, are you jacking off? Are you fucking jacking off while you suck me?”

He nodded, hummed something affirmative, and McCoy made a dirty, desperate noise--”Oh fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ”--and came hard, clawing at Spock’s skin as Spock shoved once more into his own fist and shuddered, gave his come to the sheets.

The second time, he was silent, the sound ripped from him then erased by the clever flex of the doctor’s fingers, the soft curl of his voice in Spock’s ear.

“That’s right,” McCoy whispered. “Gods, that’s good. Look how much you have to give me.”

 _There is more_ , Spock thought, his hips still moving, his cock still pulsing, so much more.

The third time, McCoy’s mouth was on him, gentle and cool, almost reverential. “Is it always like this with you?” he said between wide, slow turns of his tongue. 

Spock petted the doctor’s hair, damp now and knotted from Spock’s fingers. “Like what?”

McCoy chuckled, nudged the sound against Spock’s cock. “Like, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were doing your damnedest to get off again.”

Spock smiled at him, rubbed a thumb against McCoy’s lips as he lifted his hips, smeared his slick on McCoy’s chin. “Oh? Is that a problem, doctor? Am I keeping you from your work, perhaps?”

McCoy snorted and took Spock in, his tongue moving, his cheeks tight, but it was the look in his eyes that pushed Spock back over the edge: there was a fierceness there, a determination, that was not wholly unfamiliar, especially when the doctor’s face was streaked with his come.

“What will you tell the captain?” McCoy asked, later.

“About what?”

“About...this. About me.”

“What do you wish for me to tell him?”

McCoy considered that. “That I’m weighing my options.”

“What does that mean?” 

McCoy chuckled and caught Spock’s wrist, drew Spock’s hand to his mouth, kissed the tips of his fingers. “Just what it sounds like.” 

Spock turned onto his side and touched the doctor’s face. To do so was a mistake, for at once he felt the echo of the man’s thoughts, their beating wings barely dampened by flesh, and for a moment, he wanted nothing more than to reach for them, to watch the doctor’s face as their minds brushed, mingled, melded.

He took a breath, bit his lip, thought: _No_. _No. I cannot._

He let his hand fall to the doctor’s chest, steadied himself against the pound of McCoy’s heart.

“You should go,” McCoy said. “He can’t be used to having you out of his sight two nights in a row.”

“He knows where I am."

“All the more reason. I don’t want him to think I’m hoarding what’s his.”

Spock leaned over and bit the doctor’s lip, a gentle reproach. “As I recall, you have not yet studied my mark, have you?”

McCoy grinned and nipped him back. “Save something for next time, hmm?”

Spock kissed him and rose up, reluctant. Found his way into uniform.

When he looked back, the doctor was strung out in his bed, the blanket thrown over his body, haphazard, the space where Spock had been empty and evident.

“You--” Spock began. “You will not discuss this with anyone. The captain’s business is his own.  Is that clear?”

McCoy smiled at him, sated and lazy. “I know, I know. This is private.”

Spock’s heart gave an unexpected jolt and he found himself bent over the bed, one knee on the mattress. “A temporary state, I assure you.”

The doctor made a sleepy, pleased sound and tipped his head up for a kiss. “You’re so sure you’re gonna convince me, huh?” he murmured. “That ego, Commander. My word.”

The corridors were quiet. It was gamma shift, the core of the ship’s night, and Spock took the lift to deck five, his body heavy, pleasantly drained, but his thoughts alive, racing. Beside him, Stonn was silent, his hand resting only a few inches from his blade, and Spock was grateful for the nature of his company: for Stonn, being taciturn was akin to an art.

Stonn was ambitious, he knew, eager to please, to make his way in the Fleet, something that had once struck Spock as a weakness, one that could be easily exploited. Spock had been born into the ranks, his parents revered servants of the Empire. Stonn’s had not. Thus, it had been necessary for him to make his own way, to rise from the sands of their homeworld solely on the strength of his own merits, and it was only logical that such a drive would not die even now, when Stonn served a captain, one of the strongest in the Fleet, as bodyguard to his inamorata. In such moments as this, when Spock needed a moment to think, he appreciated Stonn. Found him easy to ignore.

That he had enjoyed the sex was not a surprise, he decided. That he had enjoyed the doctor himself was.

At the door to their quarters, Stonn took his place opposite M’Ress and Spock nodded to them both, keyed the code to their quarters, stepped in. 

The room was dim, a sullen lamp the only light. He could sense the captain’s presence but Kirk said nothing when he entered. Remained still.

He pulled off his clothes again, his boots, and moved towards the sonic. 

“No,” the captain said. The light surged up, cloaked the room in white shadow. “Come here.”

He was on their bed, perched up on his knees, and Spock went to him, looked deep into the beloved face. “If I kiss you,” Kirk said, “will I taste him this time?”

“Yes.”

The captain touched his chest, drew his fingers down Spock’s breastbone. “Well done, commander."

"Thank you."

"Did you enjoy it?”

“I did."

“Mmmmm.” Kirk caught his neck, rubbed his mouth against Spock’s, teasing, and Spock’s hands found the captain’s ribs, turned firm over his sides. “What did you two get up to, hmm? Did he come in your mouth?” His tongue flicked over Spock’s lips and in, drew Spock into a long, dirty kiss. “Oh,” Kirk said, dark delighted, “he did, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Spock said again, always.

Kirk curled his hands over Spock’s biceps. “He tastes good on you,” he murmured. “I bet you looked fucking gorgeous taking his dick. Did he say yes to you yet?”

Spock could feel the captain’s cock pressing hard into his stomach, could feel his own struggling to rise again, valiant. “He--he is considering his options.”

The captain laughed. “That sounds like something I might say.”

“Indeed.”

“Any sense of the way that he’s leaning?”

“He wants to say yes, but some part of him is reluctant. He is afraid to trust you, I think.”

“Hmmm. Well. I supposed that’s understandable.” Kirk kissed him, fed Spock a slow steady turn of his tongue. “And if I had you to assuage my fear, I’d hold on pretty damn tight, too.”

“He put his mouth on me, too. On my cock.”

A puff of breath. “He did?”

“Yes. If you were to kiss him, you would taste me there, James. You would know me, sense me, spilled over his tongue.”

Kirk’s mouth turned into a wide, hungry smile and his nails dug into Spock’s flesh, seeking green. “I’d love to see you fuck his mouth. I bet you leaked all over his chin, didn’t you, even before you gave it up. You get so hot when somebody sucks you.” He snuck a hand between and squeezed and Spock cried out, his cock overstimulated, sensitive, undeniably stiff. “Hmmm. Too bad all I want to do right now is fuck you.”

There were words from Spock’s mouth, surely, but he did not know them, could not have repeated them, for Kirk pulled him onto the bed and pushed his face into the pillows, pulled his hips up, his trousers down.

“All night,” Kirk said, fluttering the words over Spock’s hole. “You’re all that I’ve wanted. All fucking night.”

Spock bowed his back and closed his eyes and gave himself over to it, the ferocity of Kirk’s tongue, and by the time the captain was inside him, panting against the back of his neck, his whole body ached, worn out by pleasure and yet anxious for more.

The captain bit at his ear. “If I kissed your thoughts, baby, would I find him there, too?”

“No,” Spock said, somehow, his words stuttering from Kirk’s thrusts. “No. No, _ashayam_. Why would I let him touch that which is not his?”

Kirk hummed, sharp and satisfied. “That’s right,” he murmured. “That’s right, Spock. That part of you is mine. Always and only.”

It was an echo of the first time Kirk had entered him, had pressed him into the folds of a bed and eased his cock in, his fingers tracing the place where they joined, his eyes locked on Spock’s face, greedy. 

“Nobody else gets to have you like this,” Kirk had said, the words ringing over Spock’s lips, sounding inside his mind. “Nobody. You understand that? Nobody else gets to be inside your head except me. That part of you is mine.”

Spock had swept his hands down the captain’s sides, clutched the tops of his thighs, slick with sweat. “Yes, James” he said. “Yes.”

They had known each other a year and Kirk had been the captain for less than half of that. Kirk’s had been a field promotion of sorts after he left Captain Garrovick on a lost world to die, gravely wounded and set in the path of an ancient entity that was neither solid nor gas, that smelled of honey and had slayed men by the dozens until Kirk, the brash young first officer, had beamed down and taken control of the captain’s folly.

“It was the last straw,” Kirk told Spock later, “seeing all those men dead, slain by a _cloud_ , for god’s sake! and all because Garrovick was a coward, unwilling to confront the damn thing dead on.”

Officially, Garrovick had been among the cloud’s victims, an unfortunate loss for the Empire, but Kirk’s role in the matter was well known--he made certain of that. He had seen the last three survivors beamed up to the ship and then crippled Garrovick with a disrupter, cut his legs out from under him and left him helpless in the cloud’s path.

“But not before I let him see who was killing him,” Kirk had sneered to anyone who would listen. “That slug had been a drain on the Fleet for too long.”

So Kirk had ascended by his own hand and drawn Spock with him, a move that had mystified Spock at the time. He’d had little association with Kirk; as science officer, he had reported directly to Garrovick and rarely spoken to his first officer, in part because the animosity between the two men was so apparent. Kirk had been shipped from the Academy--one of Pike’s golden boys, the rumors went--to straight to Garrovick’s doorstep, and at the time, Spock had understood his captain’s resentment. Kirk was intelligent and clever and cruel, each in the right measure, and he had rallied the crew to his side seemingly without lifting a finger. He always brought his landing parties back whole and made a point of distributing part of his cut of any bounty to them, usually in the mess hall, before dozens of envious witnesses. That he was beautiful, too, and given to frequent and often public copulation with whatever beings he chose only added to his popularity. He had a knack for enriching everyone around him--those whom he favored, that is--and it did not take so very long for those he favored to far outnumber those who would do him ill.

Spock had not considered himself a member of either camp. His duty was to the Empire first, the _Farragut_ second, and the body in the center seat a distant third. They would sort it out themselves, as those competing for power always did, and Spock would be there to ensure that his part of the ship ran as it should, no matter whose blood lay on the deck.

When Garrovick was murdered, however, Kirk tapped Spock as his first officer, and he found himself at the right hand of an amazing creature, a man who reveled in excess but who was more disciplined, thoughtful, and cunning than anyone with whom Spock had served.

Kirk took an inamorata his first month in the chair, and on the surface, she was ideal: Carol Marcus, an Admiral’s daughter, a biological weapons expert, a woman who used her newfound bridge privileges to arrive unannounced, sink to her knees, and suck the captain’s cock, sloppy and stagey and deliberately difficult to ignore.

Spock did not like her. He was not certain why.

Over time, though, he found himself watching Kirk more carefully, observing his habits, his movements, his mouth in a way that seemed at odds with his usual modus operandi: to remain in the background, more a part of the ship itself than her crew.

But Kirk refused to let him stay there, made persistent, dogged efforts to drag him into the light. He assigned Spock to away teams, solicited his opinion in briefings, put him expertly on the spot, and Spock found himself responding to it, found his mind running in new rhythms, those strung at the captain’s speed. He learned how the captain thought, the seasons of his whims, the wine he drank, even the feel of his hand.

It was the last of these that broke him, in the most exquisite of ways.

They were on Orani VI, a verdant world on the edge of the Empire’s territory, just beyond the reach of her long and dexterous fingers, a world the Admiralty wanted, very much. The captain had insisted that Spock accompany him to a banquet thrown in their honor.

“Let’s be clear: it’s a bribe,” Kirk said cheerfully as they headed for the transporter room. “As if fancy clothes and good booze could buy off the Empire.”

“Perhaps it is not the Empire they are trying to bribe, sir.”

Kirk laughed. “Are you saying I’m a cheap date, Commander?”

“No,” Spock had said, reaching for diplomacy, “but the Oranis do not know that.”

The captain clambered onto the pad, chuckling. He was shirtless, his chest crossed with his sash, and he looked especially young and untouchable. “How about we keep it between you and me?” he said as his guards stepped up to his side. “Sometimes it’s nice to let somebody do their best to seduce you, don’t you think?”

“I am sure I do not know the answer to that question.”

“Mmmm,” Kirk said as he began to disappear. “Of course you don’t.”

The event was indeed lavish, and Kirk’s delight in the excess was palpable. He beamed through the ten courses of dinner, the five different wines, at the dancers who moved from table to table, lavishing attention on whomever welcomed their favor. By the end of the evening, the captain had found one he regarded as a particularly suitable match, judging by the eagerness of his kisses, the rich sounds of pleasure he made as the Orani undulated in his lap, their long dark hair falling over his face. It was not the first time Spock had seen his captain thus, full lust in his cups, but never before had he been so close to it, barely a hand's length away, so close that he could hear Kirk’s breath, the way it stopped when he kissed the Orani, their mouths open and wet, could see his eyes burn, the base of a flame, when the Orani hummed something lovely and flicked open Kirk’s trousers, drew out the fat, flush length of his cock.

Everyone at the table was watching. The Orani delegation looked indisputably smug--confident, Spock thought, that they had the captain, and by rights, the Empire, right where they wanted, as if both were so easily played, and Spock wanted to shout at them: _Never underestimate James Kirk_.

“Are you ready for me?” Kirk murmured, in a voice Spock had never heard before, hot and teasing. He slipped his hands inside the dancer’s robe and they shuddered, rocked into his touch. “You are, aren’t you? You’re gonna let me have you right here.”

The captain’s fingers found the place that made the dancer cry out and clutch at Kirk’s bare shoulder, made their grip tighten around the captain’s cock. Kirk’s head jerked and he groaned, a thick pulse of arousal that rang in Spock’s ears. Something in Spock’s body sank, like a bridge washed out in a storm, and he realized how hard he was, how hot, as if his desire were fighting to burn its way out of his skin.

He should leave. He should back away from this table, this place, the dirty hitch of Kirk’s voice, should run outside, should beam back to the ship, should--

“I should flip you over,” Kirk breathed, thrusting into the Orani’s long, beautiful fingers. “Flip you over and fuck you so they all can see your face, see how pretty you are when I make you come.”

No, Spock told himself, no, but his thoughts raced ahead of his sense and he saw himself on the table, his chest spread over the fine linen with Kirk pressed unyielding to his back, their hips moving in ragged, sweet time.

“Yes,” the captain said, more urgent now, “just like that,” and all at once he saw that Kirk was staring at him, the blue gaze full of feral intent. “Gods, that feels good. I swear, every time you look at me, you make my dick twitch.”

“Captain,” Spock said, helpless, the word caught in his throat. “Captain, please.”

The Orani shifted, spread their knees, and then Kirk was inside them, moving at a rapid pace, his eyes pinned to Spock’s face.

“When she sucks me, I think about you,” Kirk whispered. “Think how much better it would be shooting on your face, watching my spunk spill on your skin. Fuck, I come so hard when I think about you, Spock.”

Spock stood up so fast that his chair fell over, hit the stone floor with a crash.

“Commander?” one of the governors said. “Are you ill?”

He did not try to answer, turned his back instead and fled--across the great room, out the door, and into the night.

Outside, the air was heavy with the fragrance of the flowers that were everywhere on Orani, that seemed to spill from the fields into the courtyard where Spock stood trembling, their petals lapping at stone, fighting back a kind of wanting, a deep, terrible need, that he did not welcome, that he had not felt before.

There were two small moons overhead, drifting through the stars, and he lifted his face to them, did his best to think of the Watcher, to imagine that he was standing in the red sands of his homeworld watching Vulcan’s sister world turn above him, safe in her abundant light.

He took a deep breath. Yes. She would guide him.

In the desert near his father’s villa, far from the lights of ShiKahr, the Watcher dominated the sky, her eye never yielding. She had overseen her sister for millennia, before it had the name ‘Vulcan,’ when it was just an arid body with a scattered, warring population, and she was there now, Spock knew: no matter the state of the Empire or the latest whims of the Fleet, the Watcher would be there, unerring.

Before the Watcher, his people had been slaves to their passions. As other worlds advanced, Vulcan had languished, its inhabitants too busy fighting and fucking to concern themselves with production, education, community. But then some of Vulcan’s people had met her eye, had looked back, had discovered that she embodied what they did not possess: order twinned with chaos, temperance joined with emotion. Sometimes, the Watcher’s face was mercurial, marked by hundreds of storms; sometimes, it was clear, confident in her serenity, and these changes did not diminish her power, no--they made the storms look more beautiful, each day of calm more of a gift. For her early adherents, the Watcher had shown them the way: _emotions enhanced by order_ , the ancient words went, _order enriched by emotion_.

Now his people were the heart of the Empire, the very fire in its blood, some said, and in the Fleet, it was the same: Vulcans sat in the center seat for nearly two dozen starships, and for many worlds, they were the face of the Empire, sleek and stern and unyielding.

But Spock, for his part, had little interest in command. He did not lack ambition, but his patience for the constant vigilance that a captain’s gold required was limited, and he had found he far preferred his scientific duties to the disciplinarity needed to keep a clever crew in line. Garrovick had understood this--or at least, had let him be--while Kirk, Kirk had not even asked him if he wanted to be first officer; he simply gave an order, and it was done. 

And yet, he was the finest commander Spock had ever served with. For him, command was effortless, it seemed; he knew how to encourage loyalty, how to stoke fear, when to praise, when to kill. His reputation had quickly begun to spread beyond the _Farragut_ , carried on by admirers and enemies alike, and despite his qualms about his own new position, Spock had found himself more content than he had ever been in the Fleet, more at ease with himself, more certain of his path. It was not to walk alone, he was certain: he was meant to be at Kirk’s side.

In the past weeks, though, before Orani, he had come to know that he wanted Kirk, too.

At first, he had attributed his feelings to the captain’s base beauty, the insistent quality of his nature, his never-ending proximity. These were constants with which he told himself he had learned to live. But then he began to be stirred whenever the captain’s eyes lingered on him, whenever he smiled at Spock on the bridge, when he took Spock’s hands in his own while the blood on both was still fresh, and he knew that he _wanted_ , down to his bones, to the sand.

Kirk had never expressed sexual interest in him, but he told himself there was nothing wrong with wanting. Besides, he suspected the captain liked being the subject of desire, of flaunting his beauty in front of many and sharing it with very few, so Spock felt no qualms when he stroked himself in the night, recalled the captain’s face as his inamorata sucked him, twisted exquisite, and imagined himself in her place, Kirk raising his hips, his hand on Spock’s face, his mouth slurred with Spock’s name.

For Spock, that was enough. He enjoyed his position, found pleasure and purpose in his work, and he had no desire to upset that by asking the captain for more.

And yet, now, now Kirk had openly tormented him, shown him in vivid, alluring detail that which he could not have, and Spock was angry. This had gone beyond teasing; now, it felt sadistic.

He steadied himself, allowed his human half to quash some of the fire in his heart, the rage that even now made him want to march back into the hall, pull the dancer from Kirk’s lap and smash the captain in his smug, lovely face. How dare he treat Spock in this manner, taunting him, mocking him, saying things that could not be true, could they. His captain did not want him; he wanted only to publicly humiliate Spock, to--

“Spock,” Kirk snapped, suddenly upon him. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

It took him a moment to realize that Kirk was actually there, standing at his elbow, was not some manifestation of his furious imagination. He turned on his heel and stared at the captain, aghast. “What did you say?”

Kirk’s arms were crossed, his teeth bared. “My officers don’t run out in the middle of a diplomatic function, Commander, especially without their personal guard. That shit is not gonna fly with me, mister.”

Spock stepped into him, put his finger into the captain’s chest, hard. “I am surprised you noticed I was gone. You seemed otherwise occupied.”

Kirk sneered. “Sure as shit seemed like you were enjoying the show.”

“That seemed to be its intent.”

Then the captain’s hand was on him, a palm over Spock’s cock. “I see it was successful.”

Spock froze, or tried to. His hips seemed to have a mind of their own, shifting as Kirk rubbed his thumb over the head, grinning as he felt Spock’s slick leaking through, and Spock’s fury spread inward, berating himself wanting this infuriating creature who did not ask, only took, who could make him ache like this with just a muted stroke of his fingers.

“I want you,” Kirk said. Softer now, his tone so like a knife. “I know you want me.”

In his mind, Spock heard the dancer’s cries, Carol’s, remembered a thousand glances from the crew, from enemies, from allies, a hundred different faces of desire, and still he stiffened, grew hard and wet beneath Kirk’s touch. “Everyone wants you, captain. I think you have arranged the universe to ensure it.”

Kirk chuckled, his fingers easing down the length of Spock’s shaft. “But I don’t want everybody back, do I? I want you. Did my damnedest tonight to make that clear. Don’t tell me you misunderstood.” He squeezed, drank in Spock’s gasp. “Did you?”

“I do not know, I--" 

The captain leaned in and bit at Spock’s chin, the tense line of his jaw. “You didn’t. You wouldn’t feel like this if you did. And I meant it, Spock. Everything I said. Every word.”

Spock found his hands were on Kirk’s waist, found his back pressed against the warm stone of the balustrade, found Kirk’s eyes boring into him, blue skies at midnight. “I will not be a conquest,” he said. “You will not fuck me and toss me aside. I will not allow that, sir.”

Something in the captain’s face changed, as if Spock had drawn his hand across a pond. “You won’t, huh?”

“No. If that is what you wish, you should leave me be. I have no doubt there are plenty of willing bodies inside.”

Kirk kissed him, his mouth fierce and cool, his tongue tasting of wine, of what Spock guessed was the Orani. “I told you,” he said. “It’s you I want, Spock.”

They ended up in the governor’s bed, a large affair perched in an open room high above the party. The captain stripped them both without words and pushed Spock’s face into the silk, leaned his own between Spock’s legs and licked him open ruthless and fast, groaning, his hands pressed greedy into Spock’s skin.

“Fuck, you taste good,” he said, the words muffled by Spock’s flesh.  

Spock hid his teeth in the sheets and let them swallow his cries, the songs of pleasure that Kirk drew from him, willing, until Kirk slapped his ass, grumbled: “Don’t do that. Don’t hide. I want to hear you.”

Laughter from below, an echo of music. An audience. “Please,” Spock said, in a voice he did not know. “Please, I cannot--”

He felt the captain’s fingers on him now, skirting the edge of his entrance. “Come on, Spock,” Kirk murmured. “Tell me how good it feels when I touch you. I know it does.” He turned his hand, slipped it under Spock’s hips. “You wouldn’t be leaking all over the governor’s pretty linens like this if it didn’t. Come on, let me hear it.” He fisted Spock’s cock and slapped him again and then Spock could not stop himself from crying out, from drowning them both in the noise that seemed to go on and on until Kirk took his hands away and pushed at Spock’s hip, breathed: “Turn over.”

Spock shifted onto his back, arranging his legs around the captain who stared down at him, covetous. “You are gorgeous, aren’t you,” he said, his fingers brushing the inside of Spock’s thighs, his eyes incandescent. “Aren’t you the most beautiful thing.”

He caught his cock and pressed its head to Spock’s opening. Spock shuddered and spread himself wider, arched his back in anticipation, but--the captain did not enter him.

“So,” Kirk said. “Is it true?”

It took Spock a moment to find words. “Is what true?”

“That you can join minds with other beings, if you want to. I know most Vulcans can, but can you?”

“Yes,” Spock managed. “I am able to do so.”

Kirk caught Spock’s hip and held himself steady, pushed his cock in, just a touch, just enough for Spock to taste what it would be like to be full, to be filled with this man once and for all. “Good,” the captain said. “Then join us.”

“What?”

Kirk’s nails scored Spock’s flesh, the drag of his dick in, deeper. “I want to see your mind while I fuck you, Spock. I want to be inside your head while my cock’s buried in your ass.”

Spock felt his fingers singing, the psi points aching, even as rational thought recoiled in horror. “The meld is a sacred thing, Captain. It is--it can feel like an invasion, even when both parties are fully prepared for the joining. And we, you and me, we are not--”

Kirk’s hand found his cock, gave Spock a quick, not-enough pull. “We aren’t what? Hmm? Prepared? You feel pretty goddamn prepared to me, Spock.”

“Captain, please, do not ask me to--”

Kirk groaned, a beautiful, terrible sound that filled Spock’s heart with fire. “Oh,” he said, “I’m not asking,” and then Spock was full, pinned to the bed by his captain’s cock, the weight of his body, by his slash of a smile. “That’s an order.”

The sands of the ancients tugged at Spock’s thoughts and for a moment, he imagined the Watcher hanging over the bed, her light licking at Kirk’s skin, his own, as he wrapped his legs around Kirk’s waist and lifted his hips, begging the captain to move, even as his mouth said again: “Please, please, I cannot--”

“You can and you will. Right now.” Kirk nuzzled his cheek, his mouth soft, his voice triumphant. “Don’t make me take your thoughts from you.”

 _You could do no such thing_ , Spock thought, the last traces of reason, and yet, who knew? If any human could, if any human would throw himself against the barriers of Spock’s mind and knock them down by sheer force of will, surely it was James Kirk.

“Meld us,” Kirk said, his breath wet against Spock’s lips. “I won’t ask you again.”

His face was cool beneath Spock’s fingers, the psi points like ice, and Spock found he could not speak anymore. Did not need to.

Kirk’s mind was not what he expected. There were no fields of fire, no storms of fury roaring at the moon. No, the captain’s thoughts were a neatly-ordered garden, one that sang with living, with life: leaves rattling in branches that stretched towards the stars, the flowers humming, the dirt paths vibrating. The air was flush with scent of freja bushes, of apples, of Qu’oras trees from Kronos, and it was, Spock realized, a world of green built within a starship, one much like the garden that Kirk had begun constructing on the _Farragut_ , but this--what lay in his mind was far grander, far more beautiful and strange, than anything their small ship might hold.

 _It was my mother’s, this garden,_ Kirk said in their mindspace. _On the_ Tereshkova _. This is a piece of my childhood._

Spock curved his thoughts around the trees, stroked the captain’s mind with a tenderness that surprised him. _It is exquisite_.

“But where are you?” Kirk asked aloud, his hips finding a smooth, steady rhythm. “I can’t see you yet, Spock. Show your thoughts to me.”

In the mindspace, the garden wound around him, its neat corners and carefully cultivated lines growing tendrils that reached for him, pressed against his mind, hungry.

 _Let me see you_ , Kirk said in Spock’s head as the bed began to shake, as he fucked soft, hot sounds from Spock’s throat. _Goddamn it, I want to see-_ -

And all at once the sand spilled, the great rocks of Spock’s mind giving way as he himself pushed them over, broke the boulders with his bare hands and let his captain in, let the white sky of his desire, the sky of the Watcher, of his home, of his blood, flood the meld with a light that burned everything that it touched.

Kirk’s voice in his ear, hungry: “Oh fuck, Spock, that’s right. You’re so beautiful, so tight, but you want me in here, don’t you? All of me. You can take it. Yeah, you can.”

In the meld, the flowers were in flames, the paths of Kirk’s thoughts now a quicksand of heat, the trees feeding Spock’s want, the air between the leaves thick with Kirk’s own.

“You feel so good,” the captain murmured. “So fucking good. Like you were made for me, Spock. Like you’ve been waiting your whole life to get fucked like this, to have me inside you so deep.”

Spock clutched Kirk’s ass, felt the captain’s muscles flex as he drove into him again and again and still, it was not enough, it was not.

“Fuck me,” Spock whispered in their mindspace, in the folds of that alien bed. “Fuck me, captain, harder, please.”

Kirk swore and leaned into him, his hands slipping in the sheets as he bore into Spock’s body. “James,” he panted, biting the words into Spock’s cheek. “When I’m fucking you, call me James.”

Spock opened his hand, let his fingers slip from the psi points and it did not matter, for their minds were knotted too fiercely, the link singing across the slap of their skin. He had never known anything like it, this kind of connection, this feeling of union, and it made every cell in his body cry out for more, for relief, for it never to end. “James,” he said, somehow, the pleasure nearly unbearable, “do not stop, please, _please_ James, fuck--”

Then the Watcher swallowed the sky, devoured the sand, the last of the leaves, and Spock was coming in great, heavy waves, his release loud in their mindspace, like thunder trapped in a valley, and Spock could feel it, the way Kirk’s mind drank in his pleasure, greedy, the way Kirk swelled inside him, the flare of his captain’s breath. He could feel it all.

“Nobody else gets to have you like this,” Kirk groaned, the words echoing in Spock’s mind. “Nobody. You understand that? Nobody else gets to be inside your head except me. That part of you is mine.”

Spock swept his hands down the captain’s sides, clutched the tops of his thighs, slick with sweat. “Yes, James” he said. “Yes.”

Kirk made a tight, hollow noise and threw back his head and poured into Spock with a shout, his come his thoughts cool and thick inside.

“Nobody,” he said again as he came down, as they both did, as the meld softened, quieted, broke. “Nobody, Spock. You’re mine.”

In their quarters on the _Enterprise_ , acres of time and light years away from Orani, Kirk found Spock’s fingers in the sheets and Spock felt the murmur of the captain’s thoughts touch his, felt the crest of captain’s desire, his need.

 _You’re mine like this_ , Kirk said in their mindspace. _Oh, fuck, Spock. You’re all mine_.

 _I am_ , Spock thought, in a place safe from Kirk’s gaze. I have never given you reason to doubt it. Why should you need to assert it?

Perhaps it was there, he thought later, that the first seedling of his deception, his own private rebellion was planted, in the soil of the captain’s need to be reassured of that which he knew so well: Spock’s loyalty, his love. The primacy of his word. 

He had never lied to Kirk before, never willfully deceived him. There had never been a need. And never before had the captain accused him--for that is what it seemed to Spock, an accusation, albeit one wrapped up in a moment of love--of doing so. What was it about McCoy that had made Kirk even consider, much less pose, the question?

_If I kissed your thoughts, baby, would I find him there, too?_

Kirk shuddered and the link was flooded with urgency, a deep, abiding need that brought Spock’s desire up to the edge, a precipice. “I love you,” Kirk said. “Fuck, you know that, don’t you? Don’t you?”

It was in these moments, riding a crest of great pleasure, that his captain’s heart was laid bare. His uneasiness, his uncertainty, his fear of losing what he loved, losing Spock; here, in the heartbeats before his climax, James Kirk was at his most desperately mortal.

Spock clung to him, in his head, with his hands, and whispered: “I do, _ashayam_. I do.”

“What does it mean, _ashayam_?” Kirk had asked him once, long ago, the first time the word had slipped from his lips.

They were on the observation deck aboard the _Farragut_ , stretched on a soft cover beneath the stars. It was not so very long after Orani, at a time when they still had to be discreet. The captain could fuck whomever he pleased, it was true, but there was little doubt that Carol, his inamorata, would have been troubled had she known how frequently he was fucking Spock, how ardent their time together was, how fervent their affection. Sometimes, when she came to the bridge and went to her knees, Spock would watch her and think, _I have had him more completely, more fully that you ever will_ , and he would get hard with a kind of cold satisfaction that made his Vulcan blood roar.

Still, they aimed for discretion, as much as they could on a small, fighting ship like the _Farragut_. They found each other when they could and where: in the astrophysics lab, sometimes, in the lift, once or twice in Spock’s bed. And then one night, this one, Spock had filed a false repair request for the observation deck and closed it to all but himself and the captain.

Their coupling had been slow and deliberate, a luxury they were rarely afforded.

Spock had pressed Kirk onto the floor, into the silk, and touched every part of him, stroked every inch of his skin, until the captain was writhing, body and mind, all that he was reaching for Spock, his thoughts outstretched, begging, and Spock burned with it, the kind of power Kirk allowed him to have.

 _Please_ , Kirk’s mind called, his heavy cock shouted. Please, Spock. Please.

He bowed his back at Spock entered him, two slick fingers that must have hurt him, must, but all that Spock could feel in their mindspace was pleasure, was an ache that he himself had put there, a sense of emptiness in Kirk’s thoughts, waiting to be filled.

“I miss you,” Kirk said. “When our minds aren’t joined, I feel this place where you should be.” His hand snagged fierce in Spock’s hair. “I dream of you. All I can think of is you, when you’ll make me feel like this again. How good it’ll be once you’re inside me.”

Spock found his mouth and fed the captain another finger and opened all the doors to his mind, let all that he felt pour into Kirk’s head, their meld ringing with one word, one Spock had never uttered aloud to anyone: _Ashayam_. Beloved. _Ashayam_.

“What does it mean, _ashayam_?” Kirk said, after, his voice pleasantly rough. “I’ve never it before.”

Spock brushed Kirk’s hair from his forehead. “It is a word we use only among ourselves.”

“Ourselves meaning Vulcans?”

“Yes.”

Kirk stirred in his arms, and even though their link had faded, Spock could feel his curiosity. “Why?”

“Because,” Spock said, “it is a term that does not easily translate into other languages. The shades of meaning it contains can be easily lost.”

“I see. So give me the non-nuanced version.”

Spock was struck by a wave of embarrassment. Torn free from the heights of their lovemaking, he was struck by his own audacity; he did not have the right to think of Kirk in this way. He had committed a grave error, even if Kirk did not know it.

He pressed his face against the top of Kirk’s head for a moment before answering, breathed in the clean smell of his sweat, the soft remains of his desire. “At its root,” Spock said carefully, “ _ashayam_ means ‘beloved.’”

“Oh,” the captain said, only, proving that he still did not understand.

Spock took a breath. “I have no right to refer to you in this way, captain. I apologize.”

He felt Kirk’s lips turn against his throat. “I don’t know why the hell you’re apologizing.”

“Because you have an inamorata, one who is yours by law, and _ashayam_ \--this word is a claim. I cannot claim what has already been taken.”

Kirk sat up, peered down at Spock in the dark, and in the Watcher’s name, he was beautiful, naked and framed by the stars, all of creation at his back, at his command. “Shut up,” the captain said. “I’m not beholden to anybody else, not like this. You know that.” He smiled, trailed his fingers over Spock’s lips. “A title is one thing. This is something else.”

“No,” Spock said, “you are wrong, for _ashayam_ , in the ancient tongue, also means ‘beholden.’ That is, if I were to call you _ashayam_ , I would mean both that you are my beloved and that you are beholden to me.” He closed his eyes, drew back into himself for a moment before he could speak again. “My love makes you obligated to me.”

“I see.” He felt the weight of Kirk’s chest against his, the wet drag of Kirk’s mouth on his cheek.

“So it follows, does it not, Spock, that if I call you _ashayam_ , I’m saying you’re my beloved and that you’re beholden to me, too, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then.” He gave Spock a long, lingering kiss, so loving that Spock forgot to be ashamed, remembered only how good Kirk felt his arms, how sweet his skin. And then captain whispered: “I need to be inside you, _ashayam_.”

There was a catch in Spock’s side. “You do. I ache for you." 

Now, as he lay in the familiar dark of their cabin, his captain snoring softly at his side, his skin alive from the touch of two lovers, Spock felt a new ache, a new absence, a place within him that had so wanted to touch McCoy’s thoughts. He could only imagine the passion he would find there, the depth of feeling he suspected the doctor had worked so hard to bury. He was too empathetic, too kind, too devoted to the care of others to survive much longer in the Empire’s Fleet. The refugees of Mlladen were only the first; surely, he would find new ways to anger the wrong people, to attract the wrong kind of attention, and Kirk would not always be able to protect him, even if the doctor took his mark. Indeed, such a move would only attract scrutiny from the wrong kind of quarters; Komack and his allies would be especially interested in McCoy then, he and those that he loved.

There was often a price to be paid for loyalty to Kirk, for making that loyalty known.

Spock wondered if McCoy understood that. He suspected that he did not.

“ _Faith_ ,” McCoy had said, _“in you, in your word. In what you tell me about him_.” Yes, he would need to be told.

The doctor had a daughter, Spock recalled, and a spouse. They were separated from him, but still, he should be reminded what the consequences of saying yes to Kirk might be.

For a moment, he saw his father’s body again, splayed over the steps of the Vulcan War College. Felt his mother’s revulsion, her fear, heard her mind calling him: _Spock. Spock!_

It was she who had awoken him in the middle of the night, her terror screaming across the family bond, and he had sat up their bed on the _Enterprise_ , a ship that was still new to them, gasping, shaking so hard that even Kirk’s embrace could not stop the tremors. He had not known what was wrong, except that it was, and he reached back for his mother, trying to find her, seeking her voice:

_Mother. I am here. Mother. What is wrong?_

“What’s wrong?” Kirk said, his arms tightening. “Spock, jesus, what’s the matter with you?”

But there was no answer, no hint of his mother’s thoughts, though he could still feel the weight of her mind in the bond; she was alive, but unable or unwilling to respond, but his father--

_Father, Mother is in danger, she is_

And only then did he feel it, the gaping maw of his father’s absence in the bond. It was like a limb rendered, a feeling of bloody, terrible loss, and he screamed, a horrible noise that tore its way from his soul.

“My father,” he said when he could speak again. “My father is dead.”

The next morning, there was a message on his personal terminal, one that had arrived, he saw, the very time he had been awakened by his mother’s pain. There were holos of the desecration of his father’s body. Only two. More than enough. And these words on the screen: _You have all to lose and nothing to gain_. _Know this. Your alliance is folly_.

There was no signature. None was needed.

“I’ll kill him,” Kirk snarled. “I will rip his heart out of his chest, Spock, and make him eat it while it’s still fucking beating.”

“You cannot kill the Head of the Fleet,” Spock said, his voice heavy with grief. “ _Ashayam_ , you cannot.”

The captain’s face clenched. “He deserves worse than death for this. How _dare_ he! Who the fuck does he think he is?”

“A man who can kill with impunity, if he so chooses. A man with many friends, especially on Vulcan. The generals admire what they perceive as his strength, his unwillingness to compromise. They had little patience with Pike. And my father--my father was a thorn in their side. No doubt they regretted allowing him to become Consul to Earth. His death was of mutual benefit.”

Suddenly, the captain was on his knees before him. “Spock,” he had said, softer now, “this won’t stand. We’ll see that Komack gets his. For this, for Chris--I promise you, on my life. He will pay.”

Almost three years had passed and still Spock did not doubt it, Kirk’s oath, had not stopped believing that it would one day come true; they worked towards it together, drawing closer, he was certain, every day.

Would McCoy understand this? Would he want to be part of it? He had no stake in battles between admirals, in the blood feud between Komack and Pike. He was Fleet in name only, not by choice.

And yet, Spock thought, what had the doctor to lose? His wife had already been taken from him. His child. By the Fleet, yes. And thus, by Komack. All semblance of his old life already erased.

No wonder he did not fear for his life, Spock thought. What a powerful weapon McCoy would be; indeed, he already was, for the man thought he had nothing to lose.

On that night and many that followed, he told himself this was why the doctor fascinated him, ate at him, lingered in his thoughts far more than he should have. He told himself this was why he was so eager to peer into McCoy’s mind: to determine the full breadth of his utility.

Spock was an excellent liar, especially to himself. Especially when the alternative was too dangerous to contemplate.


	4. Chapter 4

What surprised McCoy most about Spock was the one thing he should've been able to anticipate: the Vulcan was contradiction personified.

The Spock who walked the halls, who hovered at Kirk’s side, he was circumspect. Careful. Controlled. He wasn’t without emotion, but didn’t let them rule him, either, as his captain sometimes did. He was a man of pedigree, of unique heritage, too; a powerful mixed bloodline that many admired and some feared and yet he didn’t lord his parentage over people, as others might have, didn’t lean on it as a source of intimidation or strength.

He didn’t have to. He could be plenty terrifying on his own.

McCoy had never actually seen Spock agonize anyone, for which he was grateful, but he’d seen the results once or twice: contact burns from the agonizer itself; tremors in limbs that kept up for hours, long after the pain stimulus was gone. Spock was a master with the thing.

Then there was Sulu’s henchman, that hapless, would-be assassin who’d tried to shiv Kirk on the bridge some months ago. His body had been hung in the corridor outside the mess hall, his lungs nailed to the bulkhead beside what was left of his head. And beside the husk, the captain’s symbol sketched in red: a thick tree whose branches strained towards the sky even as its trunk was split by a star. There’d been no question at to whose handiwork that was. Spock might as well have signed his name to it.

After a full cycle of shifts, two of McCoy’s orderlies had been allowed to clean up that particular mess. One of them, Eidar, hadn’t eaten for a week.

No, the Spock that stalked the halls, the one whose chest bristled with accolades, the one who had the captain’s ear was not somebody you wanted to cross.

But the one who showed up at McCoy’s door, who beckoned the doctor to his, was someone else altogether. When they were alone, the harsh light of the corridors giving way to the shadows, something in Spock seemed to ease, like hard earth giving way slowly to sand. The same substance, reconceived, the same creature, reconsidered. A creature not soft, but pliant; not submissive, but anxious for every word, every touch.

It was, McCoy thought, an extraordinary performance.

The way he reacted to McCoy’s mouth on his cock, for instance. He’d never been with anyone who seemed to enjoy being sucked as much as Spock did, who threw himself wholeheartedly into that pleasure with such apparent joy. The doctor knew better than to be moved by it, he did, but it seared something in him nonetheless, the way Spock’s jaw went tight when he got it just right, the way he arched his back and opened his mouth and shuddered, every sound incandescent.

Stripped from his silks, his high collar, the commander’s skin seemed to glow, green hollows and hills that set his dark hair aflame as it pooled on his chest and trailed down between his thighs, where it grew heavy damp from his arousal, from languorous strokes of McCoy's tongue. He was beautiful like that, this fearsome creature of the Fleet, when his thighs were hot against McCoy’s head, when his body clamped hard around McCoy’s fingers as the doctor lapped at the head of his cock, soft and fern-feather green.

“Come on,” McCoy urged. “You don’t even need to be in my mouth, do you? You can come just like this. I know you can.”

He heard Spock’s nails in the sheets, two fists parallel to his hips, as if he were willing himself not to lay his hands over McCoy’s head or tug at his hair. He was oddly shy about such things, that sort of touch, and McCoy looked up, ready to make his permission explicit, but Spock—Spock was elsewhere. His head was tipped all the way back, his chest flushed, his throat working around a chorus of low, needy sounds.

McCoy chuckled. “Damn it,” he said, “don’t argue with me, Spock.” He flicked his tongue over the slit and stretched his fingers, earning a thick pulse of slick for his troubles, a hot, hollow groan. “You don’t look like you’re gonna prove me wrong.”

He nuzzled the base of Spock’s cock, breathed in the smell of him, spice, and moved his hand faster, fucked into Spock hard, harder, again. Spock’s hips jerked and inside, he started to flutter, tight tremors, and McCoy wondered what it would be like to shove his cock deep into this lovely, willing body.

It wasn’t the first time he’d thought about it, but it had never been so insistent before, the urge to watch himself sink into Spock, to feel their bodies lock together like that. Spock would take it. He’d welcome it. He’d arch his hips back until McCoy was all the way in and then chase kiss after kiss as McCoy slid out, slammed back in.

 _Fuck_. He groaned, feeling the sound resonate in Spock’s skin, and then he felt the tips of Spock’s fingers on his forehead. Flickers of ice, he felt; the soft shine of wind chimes.

“Oh,” Spock said, his voice reedy, distant, “oh, Leonard, you’re going to make me come.”

And then he was, his come like silver melting: the heat of it, the steel, all at once a molten river that kissed McCoy’s lips, caught his chin, seeped into his beard as Spock shouted, his hand falling to McCoy’s shoulder. He felt the catch, the tear, somewhere, and McCoy realized he was bleeding, but his cock didn’t care; he stiffened against the sheets and came with a sudden, satisfied cry, the taste of Spock thick on his tongue.

Spock kissed him, after. Stroked the sting his nails had left behind and kept McCoy close.

Moments like that, as he drifted between desire and reason, McCoy could almost forget that they were playing pretend. The pleasure he found in their encounters was real enough; perhaps Spock’s was, too. But the affection Spock seemed to have for him, his pliancy in bed, his gentleness—those felt like techniques, means of persuasion tailored especially for him. The Spock he went to bed with was the Spock they thought he wanted. He was sure of it.

And it was damned effective, or it would’ve been, if he hadn’t been aware of how hard he was being played, of how anxious they were to have him as an ally, for whatever goddamn reason. As the traders on Rigel VII might say: he was getting the hard sell.

Still, it’d been a long time since he’d had sex with anybody, much less a body as beautiful and willing as Spock’s. And he didn’t get home from his shift and feel that same rock bottom sink in his gut at the thought of 10 full hours alone because Spock would be there soon, or he’d be in the ‘lift on his way to the officers’ deck. Hell, he hadn’t realized how lonely he was, how quiet his life out of MedBay had become, until Spock stepped in and chased away the silence with the sounds of his satisfaction.

He seemed content to wait for McCoy’s answer to the question Kirk had posed and McCoy had decided there was no rush. If Kirk’s version of pressure was to send his inamorata to the doctor more often, so be it. There was no reason McCoy couldn’t enjoy being seduced, even if he’d already made up his mind.

He opened his eyes and watched intricate shadows sway over the ceiling. The lamps over the bed cast a gentle, forgiving light, and room itself seemed softer when Spock turned off the overheads and lit them instead. They filled the room with a sweet, smoky odor, too, something like sandalwood that made the air feel like silk.

It had only been a week, he told himself. Once he formally assented and took the captain’s mark, this kind of luxury would be lost to him. There wasn’t any harm in enjoying all this while he could.

He caught his breath and stretched, trying to work the knots from his back. Spock stirred, his grip tightening.

“Leaving so soon, doctor?”

McCoy chuckled. Laid his head back on Spock’s shoulder and stroked a hand down his ribs, found the Vulcan’s hammering heart. “No. Not yet.”

 

__________________

 

He spent most the next day with the Mlladen.

Linguistics had finally nailed down the discursive logic of their language—a working version of it, anyway—and they dispatched a twitchy ensign named Aryx to deliver a handful of Universal Translator nodes adapted for McCoy and his team.

Aryx, god bless him, would not shut up about it.

“Yes, you should have no comprehension problemssss,” the ensign said for the third time, “though the Mlla may find your verbiage to be stilted and even archaic. It is an effect of tracing their discursive patterns back to the root of—”

McCoy cut him off and started herding Aryx toward the door. “So I might sound like their grandmas, is that it?”

Aryx stammered backwards, bobbing in his boots. “Colloquially expressed, but yes. Your meaning, however, should be clear.”

“Yeah, well, let’s hope so. If anybody spits in my face, Aryx, you’ll be getting an earful. Believe me.” He got the ensign out of his office, fucking finally, and bolted towards the open Bay.

“Cho!” he snapped at the nearest orderly, “grab Eidar and head down to cargo bay 2. Bring up the first three Mlla you can get your hands on. And here” —he held out two of the UTs—” put these things on.”

He dashed around, scattering nurses and grabbing shit he probably wouldn’t need, trying not to grin like an idiot. God, he’d been waiting for this forever. Finally, fucking finally, he could give each of the Mlla a thorough physical. The triage he’d supervised when they came onboard had been cursory at best and the follow-up care far from comprehensive, but he’d been reluctant to do much more without some way of communicating with them, some meaningful mode of exchange.

Nobody knew a damn thing about the Mlladen. That was the problem. Aside from the geological survey of their planet a Fleet drone had conducted the year before, which McCoy did not count, because who the fuck would need to operate on a rock?

The only good thing about the drone not identifying anything of “immediate value” was that it meant the Fleet had left the Mlladen alone. According to the records, somebody at HQ had marked the planet for “exploration” (exploitation) in the future when somebody had nothing better to do than to harass an innocent species. Which the survey of the Mlla system suggested would be a long goddamn time. Why the Fleet had been poking around that far outside of Empire-controlled territory wasn’t officially stated, but to McCoy, it was pretty damn clear: the Empire was desperate.

Though nobody dared to discuss it on the public holonets, it was common knowledge that the core worlds were getting tired of the Romulan War, tired of shouldering the burden for a decade-long conflict with no apparent boundaries or purpose. So it made sense, in a fucked-up kind of way, that the Fleet would have pushed its reach towards the Rim, not to conquer or colonize but to find new sources of supplies, the raw materials it took to mount a never-ending war. There’d been rumbling to that effect on Earth in the months before McCoy himself had been collected like so much mineral ore, and that was more than two years ago. Who knew how bad things had gotten since?

So beyond the basic physiological data McCoy had been able to collect, there was no information about the Mlla of practical use. But by god, he thought, the next doctor who encountered them—on a new world Kirk might find for them or on whichever starbase they passed that didn’t have Captain Mitchell and the _Intrepid_ in residence—wouldn’t have to work from a blank slate.

He punched on the screens in private bay 8 and felt a flicker of pride. Anybody with an MD and half a lick of sense could stitch somebody up, save a single life, but rescuing the Mlla, keeping them safe, that was something only he could’ve done. It made him feel useful. It made him feel like a real goddamn doctor again.

There was an eruption of noise and Cho and Eidar appeared outside the bay half-carrying, half-dragging three terrified-looking Mlla.

McCoy hit his UT, felt its weird snappy hum as it clicked into his neural net. “Hello,” he said. “Good morning.”

The Mlla stopped yelling and looked at him, puzzled. “You speak ours?” one said.

“Hell yes,” McCoy said with a grin. “I do now.” He patted the biobed. “Who’s up first?”

Most of the injuries he saw on the Mlladen were new, basic cuts and bruises. They had delicate scales on their limbs that he learned slowly rusted from blue at birth to shades of gold and red and orange; bruised, the scales bloomed like orchids, fierce purples and whites. The children especially seemed prone to them. Maybe because they were kids trying to play in a cargo bay, he thought. Even your basic rough and tumble on durasteel would result in unintended injury. But no one he examined was gushing blood. That was something.

But a few were undeniably ailing, their scales dusky, as if the colors had been leached away. There was a young man who’d removed the dermaplast bandage McCoy had placed over a gash in his face—“Because it itched,” his twin sister said, disapproving—and the wound had become infected. A baby who’d caught the Mlla equivalent of an upper respiratory infection. A woman who’d twisted her lower appendage. A boy who’d bonked his head on the bulkhead on the way to MedBay.

McCoy sincerely hoped Cho hadn’t had anything to do with that.

And then there was Ishi.

She was the girl whose father had made a point of pestering McCoy during each of his forays to the cargo bay, lack of language be damned. And although McCoy had always politely brushed him off, seeing no immediate cause for concern, he saw now that the father had been right to worry.

The contrast between she and the other children he’d seen was brutal. If the healthy Mlla looked as though they’d stepped out of a sunrise, Ishi appeared to be drowning in clouds. The scales on her limbs were gray and brittle and her eyes were dull, like covered candles. There was something in her body going wrong, that much was apparent, and yet he couldn’t locate any visible sign of acute injury.

He kicked himself as he worked, bit back his rage. Damn his cautiousness. Damn it. Two weeks these beings had been cooped up down there, away from water and decent recycled air and good light. How the hell had he convinced himself that was ok? He should’ve listened to Ishi’s father. He should’ve brought her up here sooner, brought the whole lot of them above decks, the captain and potential miscommunications be damned.

He smoothed back the child’s tawny hair. “Ishi, where do you hurt?”

His words slid through the UT and marched out, tinny and flat, the computer’s best approximation of the Mlladen's standard vocal affect. He watched the child listen, her small face pursing.

“Here,” the UT said for her after a moment, as she folded her narrow hands over her belly. “The hurt lives in here.”

McCoy looked up at her father, Bev, who was standing at the head of the bed, the two fingers on each of his hands twisted together. “I don’t see any marks,” McCoy said. “No scars. What she cut here, during the attack? Did she bleed, maybe before we brought you up here to the ship?”

Bev’s mouth turned down, his face now mirroring his daughter’s. “There was no life fluid, no. She was not wounded in that way. What she says is that her pain lives deeper.”

“The hurt is in here,” Ishi said again, pointed this time, her childish exasperation so like Jo’s for a moment that it brought him up short. God, who the target of Jo’s exasperation was these days? Who did she glare at when she was angry? Whose rooms was she stomping out of now, hoping to be chased?

He swallowed, said: “Yes, but where is ‘here,’ exactly? Tell me more about it.”

The child huffed, no translation needed: _You’re an idiot_.

Bev tapped her shoulder. “Explain to Mac Khoi,” he said. “Remember, he is of the stars, not the sea. You will have to tell him each part, because he does not know of such things.”

That was something several of the Mlla had said to him. _He is of the stars, not the sea_. It had puzzled him at first. But the more Mlla he’d spoken to, the more convinced he became that they’d never encountered offworlders until some had shown up out of nowhere, unseen, and blown apart their idyll. _Of the stars, not the sea_. And they’d sure as hell had never seen any up close until the _Enterprise_ had beamed them aboard—something he hadn’t considered when he’d begged the captain to act.

No, he’d been horrified by the drone footage broadcast on the viewscreen, the creatures it’d shown huddling in fallen structures, stretched prone in the shallows, bleeding and terrified. He’d reacted instinctively, jammed open a channel to the bridge and said: “Captain” —a plea, a prayer—“let me help.”

And that’s what he was still trying to do. Even as the consequences of that choice were becoming more clear.

Ishi pursed her lips again and tugged at the cord that hung from her neck, worried the smoky stone that it carried. Thinking. Finally, she said: “My past times are here. What I have felt, loved, and remembered. I hold them for safekeeping, so that as my blood flows, so do my past times. So I will not forget. And right now, what I remember is...grief. Sadness. Pain. They live in me.” She pressed her stomach again, her eyes finding his. “I keep them in here, Mac Khoi.”

 _Jesus_. McCoy felt like he’d been punched in the chest. She was describing post-traumatic stress, to a T. It had to be, physiologically be damned. She’d wound up all her fear and horror and bundled it into her body and she was so small, god. Who the fuck knew what she’d seen down there. Her whole world torn apart. People she’d known all her life, slaughtered. No wonder she hurt. So goddamn much pain.

He reached for the child’s hand, gently tapped the backs of her fingers. “You’re sad,” he said. “That’s why you feel so bad. Things have happened that’ve upset you, made you feel angry and sad.”

The child blinked up at him. “No cuts. But it still hurts.”

McCoy’s throat felt treacherously tight. “Well, my dear,” he said, trying to keep the words light, “of course it does.”

“She’s depressed,” McCoy spat later as he paced the confines of his quarters: two steps forward, two steps back. No progress, no escape. And is it any fucking wonder!? I’ve been piling trauma on top of trauma, haven’t I? First by revealing our existence, the presence of a goddamn unknown universe and then by caging these people in a fucking cargo bay. No windows, no light, no room, just dozens of other upset Mlla, all of them feeding each other’s worry and fear! God, it’s a wonder they’re not all fading, wasting away down there like—like—”

Spock touched his arm, gripped it, brought his furious march to stop at the foot of the bed. “You are doing all you can for them. No one can dispute that.”

McCoy shoved a hand through his hair. “Yeah, well, I sure as hell can.”

“What would you do, if you were afforded the means?”

“Give them beds,” McCoy said at once. “House them in proper fucking quarters. Give them some modicum of privacy and dignity. Stop treating them like shit that we’re just carrying around for the hell of it.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, that’s all! Don’t look at me like that. We both know the captain could do it right now if he wanted to. But he won’t. He’s already made that abundantly clear.”

The corners of Spock’s mouth turned and he found McCoy’s hand, gripped it. “Is that all?” he repeated.

The touch was soothing for some reason, the stroke of Spock’s thumb over his, the sure, firm heat of his palm. McCoy closed his eyes. Caught his breath. “For now, yeah. For now. It’s not so much to ask, is it?”

“No,” Spock said, soft. “It is not. And if it were mine to give, you would have it.” He touched the rough cord wound around McCoy’s wrist. “What is this?”

“Ah, a, uh. I’m not sure, actually. Ishi gave it to me.”

Spock stroked the stone where it lay flush against McCoy’s skin. “She knows that you are trying to help. Children are often wise in that way. They see kindness where others would look past it.”

“I don’t know how kind it is to give a kid some hypos and send her back to sleep on durasteel, Spock.”

Spock turned McCoy’s wrist and kissed his palm. “You have done what you can. And that is far more than most others would have done.”

McCoy petted Spock’s hair; smooth, even silk. “I’ll try to remember that.”

A sigh, and Spock shifted. He leaned forward and eased his mouth over the catch of McCoy’s trousers.

“ _Oh_. Mmmm, fuck. Spock, you don’t have to—”

Spock looked up at him, his eyes dark and warm. “Let me give you what I can,” he said.

McCoy caught his neck and leaned down, kissed that lush, perfect mouth, murmured: “How can I say no to that?”

The next afternoon, there was a message on his office comm. He almost missed it; there’d been a melee in the main recreation hall and an anti-grav accident in the shuttle bay, and it’d taken his team all day just to sort through the mess. He needed another surgeon, damn it. He’d have to dig back into the roster and see if anybody was ready for promotion. T’Sia, maybe? Or Decker?

His mind was elsewhere and exhausted and in his eagerness to flee, he nearly looked past the blinking amber light on his desk. Nearly.

He slapped the switch and turned away, grumbling, only to wheel around when he heard Uhura’s voice.

“Doctor McCoy.”

“Chief Uhura! I didn’t know you were—”

But she spoke over him, unaware, and it took his tired brain a minute to realize why. _Because it’s a message, you dolt_.

“The captain asked me to inform you,” the image of Uhura was saying, “that the transfer of the Mlla to guest quarters on decks P & Q has been completed as of 1845 this evening.”

He nearly choked. “What?”

“My team has sealed the Jeffries tubes in these sections, blocked the ‘lifts, and posted guards to ensure that the Mlla remain in their assigned areas,” she continued in her trim, formal voice. “No crew members are to interact with them, other than yourself and any additional medical personnel you choose to designate. Otherwise, they are under your jurisdiction.” Her eyes sharpened to a point. “He asks me to remind you that you are answerable for their behavior. Should there be a transgression, the captain will not hesitate to...relocate them as he sees fit. Uhura out.”

He realized he was gripping the desk, the edges biting into his flesh. My god, he thought. It couldn’t be.

He played the message again, and a third time, and it was only then that he let the meaning sink all the way in, that his knees gave way and he sank disbelieving to the floor.

Just like that. Kirk had reversed course, just like that, just because—

Because Spock had asked him to. It had to be.

 _Let me give you what I can_.

“I’ll be damned,” McCoy said. “I’ll be good goddamned.”

He folded his hands over his face and laughed, a sound of relief, of amazement.

It was a tactic, sure. Another performance of the captain’s goodwill designed to say: _Join me, doctor, and many more of your strange whims will be met._

But it was more than that, this gesture, he thought later, standing in Ishi’s quarters. It felt like a kindness.

The rooms that Ishi and her father would be sharing with a pair of sisters, Pasham and Perix, weren’t much bigger than his own; it’d be a tight fit. There really wasn’t anywhere for him to sit. So he stood by the doors, watching Bev and Pasham make the bed while Ishi and Perix raced around, shouting at the top of their lungs. The sonic shower seemed to be a big hit, as did the drawers concealed in the bulkhead. McCoy was in the way, he knew it, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave, not just yet. The children’s excitement was contagious and, from the happy melee in the corridor, wasn’t unique among their peers.

Ishi did another pass around the tiny desk and threw herself at McCoy’s knees, hugged them tight. She was still gray as a fogbank but her face was unquestionably lighter, as if she’d stepped out from under a shadow. “Hello,” she said, beaming.

He couldn’t help but smile back. “Hi Ishi.”

She tapped the cord—hers—wound tight around his wrist and looked up at him, said something the UT couldn’t translate.

“What? Ishi, I didn’t—”

But she didn’t answer, just dashed off like her feet were on fire, calling to Perix, the two of them tumbling into the washroom and sealing the door.

Bev looked at McCoy and raised his shoulders. “Apologize. She is like a wave sometimes—motion, motion, motion until a crash.”

“She’s like this a lot, huh?”

“Yes,” Bev said with an unmistakable smile. “I have missed it.”

It was a kindness, what Spock had asked the captain do for these people. What Spock had asked the captain to do for McCoy.

They had no plans to meet that evening and McCoy knew what that meant, where the commander was, what he was probably doing, and still, he was tempted to message him anyway, to take a chance at interrupting.

But instead, he keyed into Spock’s personal comm and spoke there. Two words, heartfelt: “Thank you.”

He wanted to say more, figured he would the next time they met, but when they collided in his quarters a few days later, Spock had no interest in talking.

 

___________________

 

There was a steady nervous build of rumors below decks that something had gone seriously wrong, that their patrol on the edge of nowhere had gone south somehow, and fast. The rumors had been around for a while, but in the days after the Mlladen were moved, they grew louder and a lot harder for McCoy to ignore.

At first, it was only the silence from the bridge, from the captain, that was unusual. Kirk wasn’t one to clog the comms, but he did have a conversational relationship with his crew more often than not. He liked people to know what was going on, he’d say: _After all, it’s your ship, too._ A strange attitude for a dictator, maybe, but one McCoy had come to find reassuring, even if what the captain chose to share was likely manufactured—or at least massaged for the best possible spin.

For days, though, there was nothing. Not a word. Not even a glimpse of Kirk’s face on the viewscreen, his cocky, question-me-at-your-own-peril smile. That was when people started to get antsy.

It didn’t help that they were too far out to access private comm channels or to sign into the public holonets. A total information blackout. In the absence of real news, of any good information, the imaginative among them started to come up with some pretty spectacular shit: they were being chased by a great ship of unknown origin. Or a fleet of Klingon pirates. Or a Romulan bird of prey, as far as home as they were and antsy for a kill.

Or maybe the Romulan war had come to final, cataclysmic end on the other side of the Empire and the _Enterprise_ was the only Fleet ship left alive, floating out in space, all alone.

As the speculation grew stranger, the captain’s silence louder, an unsettled quiet crept over the crew. In the public spaces—the mess hall, the pleasure lounges, the gardens—the calm was especially eerie. Fights and accidents ceased, as did lover’s duels; the petty bullshit that made for a lot of MedBay’s business on a given day. For McCoy, business was bad, and normally, that would’ve been cause for celebration or at least a sigh of relief, but this reprieve was different. It was like every member of the crew was holding their breath, their ears cocked to the nearest comm, waiting for the thing to come to life, waiting for Kirk’s voice to pour out and tell them what the hell was going on.

He didn’t.

Two days passed like that, and then three. Four.

The whole ship was strung up tighter than a bow. Waiting.

For McCoy, Spock’s absence was the biggest tell that something was seriously wrong. No word. No messages. Nothing.

Until his doors blew open in the middle of the night.

He sat up, startled. “What the fuck?”

The lights rose just enough for him to catch the dark shape headed towards him, the one that crashed into the bed and clambered over him. “I do not have much time,” the shadow said. “Do not make me waste it.”

“Spock, what’s—”

But Spock swallowed his question with a long, furious kiss. He was already aroused, his cock pressing firm in his trousers as his hips moved over McCoy’s, and there was nothing McCoy could do but lie back and take it.

“Whatever you want,” he got out when he could finally breathe. “Jesus, Spock, do whatever you want.”

Spock growled, a sound that rattled the bed, and yanked McCoy out of his shorts.

“Whatever I want,” Spock repeated. He found McCoy’s cock and tugged at it, hard. Too hard. “Are you certain of that?”

He was still dressed, for god’s sake, still wearing his boots, and McCoy was bare, stripped down and pinned like a butterfly in the black, stiffening in the clutch of Spock’s fist. His face burned with it, how ridiculous he felt, how fucking turned on he was, having Spock use him like this.

“Yes,” he said, stuttering. “Yes, fuck. Please, Spock. Please.”

“You don’t even know what you’re asking for. Do you.”

He rubbed his thumb under the head and McCoy cried out, babbled: “No. Yes. You. I want you.”

Spock buried his face against McCoy’s neck and breathed and breathed, his fist never ceasing, and it was like being smothered in silk: the drag of his clothes over McCoy’s body, the heat of his hands, the faint gorgeous smell of him, somewhere McCoy couldn’t touch.

“Do you want to come?” Spock said. “Tell me.”

“ _Yes_. God, yes, Spock—”

A kiss under his jaw. Small and perfect. “I need you to.”

“ _Shit_. Shit.”

“Yes, Leonard. Yes. Come for me. Come.”

McCoy found Spock’s mouth and shattered between heartbeats, a bolt of pleasure so bright that he was blinded. He lost sight of himself. For a moment, he knew only Spock.

When he opened his eyes again, Spock was straddling his hips, shirtless, his trousers open as he tugged the wet length of his cock. He was staring at McCoy, his dark gaze as firm a hold as his fingers had been. “I wanted you,” he said. “I wanted you, Leonard.”

The doctor’s arms floated down and he clutched at Spock’s thighs, the heave of them, the strain. “You did, huh?”

“And I had to leave,” Spock said, the words falling out in a rush, “I could not stay there. I had to tell the captain that I needed, _oh_ —” His back arched, an elegant, fevered line, and his strokes grew shorter now, desperate. “Fuck. Oh, Watcher. Oh, fuck.”

McCoy let his fingers fall over and in and then he was petting Spock’s balls, the soft skin pulled over them tight and sticky with slick. He squeezed them once, twice, and Spock was coming in great, heaving gasps, spunk stuttering over his fist as he emptied himself, as his cock jerked again and again.

“That’s good,” McCoy said. His mouth felt lazy, like he was singing in a dream. “You’re so pretty when you give it up like that.”

Spock smiled, a soft sweep that brushed the last of tension away. “I missed you.”

He tumbled to McCoy’s side like a tower in slow motion and turned in, his head against McCoy’s chest.

“Well,” McCoy said softly. “I missed you, too.”

They lay still for a while.

“Bad day?” McCoy asked.

Spock made an assenting sound. “A taxing one, as has been the norm of late.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Spock raised his head, opened one sleepy eye. “I can assure you that you are not responsible.”

He reached up and ran his fingers through Spock’s hair, teased the tips of his ears. “Be that as it may. I can sympathize.”

“You are a wonder, Leonard.”

Maybe it was the hour or the circumstance or the last of the brandy, but just for a moment, McCoy let himself wonder: what if it were true? What if the note of affection he heard in Spock’s voice were real and not a skillful affectation?

The smile spread on his face before he could stop it. Thought: _That wouldn’t be the worst thing, now would it_?  “I hate to break it to you, Spock,” he said, “but sympathy is hardly a wondrous act. Now, if I manage to pull a sehlat out of my hat, that’d be—“

A kiss. Less needy than before, less urgent, but far more intoxicating, a slow burn in his blood like too much brandy.

“I will not argue with you,” Spock said at last. “Not on this point.”

“God, fine, ok,” McCoy said, his nails climbing the curve of Spock’s neck. “Now come back here. I’m not done with you yet.”

“No. I am needed back on the bridge.”

“You what?”

“I am still on duty. The section we are patrolling at present presents many challenges to our—”

“Wait, wait—you’re still on _duty_? At this hour? Then what the fuck are you doing down here?”

Spock shifted, suddenly cagey. “Twice during my last duty shift, my calculations were only accurate to the ninth place, rather than the tenth. I was...displeased by those mistakes.”

“Naturally.”

“After some reflection, I discovered the source of the error.”

“Uh huh. And what was that?”

A chuckle. “My thoughts were with you and not on my work, as they should have been.”

“Well, it has been what, three whole days since we saw each other?”

“4.3.”

“4.3. Well. So nobody could blame you for being distracted.”

Their mouths met again, deeper, and McCoy turned himself over Spock’s body, let the Vulcan take all of his weight. “Stay,” he said. “You’ve got another one in you. You do. I can feel it. After 4.3 days, one isn’t nearly enough.”

Spock’s hands found the curve of his ass. “Is that your medical assessment?”

“Mmmm. And anyway, you’re gonna have to chase down some new trousers.” He hitched his hips, dragged his cock against Spock’s. “You made a mess out of these.”

“Be that as it may, I cannot stay.”

“You keep saying that, commander, and yet I can’t help but notice that you’re still here.”

“You are a terrible influence on me.”

“God, I hope so.”

He got in one more fevered kiss before Spock shoved him away, gently; said his name again and drew reluctantly away from the bed. He pulled himself together as McCoy watched—his boots again, his tunic—and it was striking, the difference between the being who’d stormed in and the one about to step out. The tension in his body had eased, like a fire stoked back to embers, and there was a calm to his face that some might mistake for softness. It wasn’t that, quite; it was more like the sea after a storm, settled, with all the world still churning beneath.

Spock smiled, a hand's breadth from the door. “I am sorry to have disturbed your slumber.”

“The hell you are,” McCoy said once the doors closed. “I’m not.”

He fell asleep with the lights on, feeling more at ease than he had in ages.  


_____________

 

His good mood, however, lasted only a few hours into alpha shift, until Chapel breezed into his office unannounced. She propped herself in the doorway, her arms crossed, cavalier. “Len,” she said, “when were you going to tell me?”

He sighed and crossed his eyes at the monthly lab reports he’d been trying to code. “Tell you what?”

“That you have friends in high places.”

Goddamn it. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Chris raised an eyebrow. “Let’s see: in the last few weeks, you’ve been called to the bridge, you’ve been contacted by Commander Uhura, you’ve had several private meetings with Commander Spock—when both of you were off-duty, I might add.”

He should’ve known this was coming, he thought. For all that she unnerved him, Chris was a friend—albeit one he had to hold at arm’s length sometimes. Nobody else on board would’ve cared enough to track his comings and goings, would’ve given a damn who he spoke to and when.

Plus, she had the best sources on the ship. If some crewman had taken notice of Stonn or M’Ress standing guard outside McCoy’s quarters in the middle of the night, for instance, no doubt Chapel would’ve been among the first to hear.

They shouldn’t have surprised him, her powers of deduction, but they had, so it took him a moment to find words, the right tone of nonchalance. “You may find this difficult to believe, Chris, but officers do talk to other officers. Shocking, I know.”

“Hmmm. Sometimes I forget you’re an officer, technically.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

“I’m not sure that you should.”

And there, he thought, went the last of his good mood. “Is there a point to this, or did you just get bored and wander in here to insult me?”

“You’ve been CMO for two years. Two goddamn years, Len. And in all that time, you’ve never had as much contact with command staff as you have in the last three weeks.”

“And?”

She spread her hands and gave him a glorious gauntlet of a smile. “And I want to know why.”

He felt a slow sink in his chest, like a rock reaching for a creek bed. It was like when he and Jocelyn used to fight in the early hours of the morning, just after she’d come home from her shift; both of them angry and exhausted and determined to hurt the other without raising their voices, without waking up Jo. He wanted to shout but he couldn’t, knew he shouldn’t. Fuck. “First of all,” he said through his teeth, “I answer to the captain, not to you. And second, surely you have better things to do than obsess about how I spend my time. If you don’t, if you find that being my second leaves you with too many idle hours on your hands, then I’d be happy to bust you down to nurse and give the MD to somebody who’d make the most of the opportunity, like T’Sia, rather than piss it down their leg like you seem determined to.”

Her face froze, her cavalier expression caught in cement. “I can assure you that—”

“I have no goddamn interest in your assurances, Chapel.”

He let the silence hang there for a moment, let the weight of her presumption fill the room. Let her feel it. Said:

“Did you ever stop to think what it might mean—how did you put it? —me having friends in high places?”

Chris’ lips thinned. “Sir?”

He moved out from behind his desk and sat on the edge. Crossed his arms. “If, as you suppose, I have the captain’s ear, or Commander Spock’s, I could call them right now and ask them to make room for you in the booth. Explain to them that you’ve overstepped your bounds, grossly. That you’re very much in need of correction. That you have forgotten your place.”

Her face flared, defiant. “I haven’t.”

“You _have_.” It was like cutting into a vein, talking to her like this, tapping into a well of rage and resentment he thought he’d capped long ago. God, it felt good. “At every fucking turn.”

“I’ve forgotten _my_ place? Fuck you. I don’t give a shit what your title is. You don’t know the first thing about the Fleet. Nothing. I was raised in, trained for it, fought—and you’re a goddamn draftee, for god’s sake! You weren’t even in the line of succession! M’Benga had chosen me.”

“M’Benga didn’t appoint me. The captain did.”

She scoffed, a brutish bark. “And what the fuck Kirk sees in you, I’ll never know. You’re nothing but civvie slag, no matter how many pips they hang on your chest. Everybody knows that, McCoy. Not just me.”

 _What the hell_. Maybe arm’s length hadn’t been far enough. Why the fuck had he trusted her, even that much? And how had she managed to hide all this from him, her contempt for him, her _hate_?

He snapped his anger like a whip. “You’re off duty as of now, Chapel, until further notice. Without pay. And I’m docking you for today’s shift.”

She didn’t flinch. “I docked myself every fucking hour I tried to help you,” she sneered. “Wasted every second I tried to save the rest of the ship from your incompetence.”

“You want me to recoup your pay for the last two years? Fine. Keep talking and I can sure as shit make that happen. Me and my fancy new friends.”

That shut her up. Long enough for him to key the comm and summon an orderly.

“Escort Nurse Chapel to her quarters,” McCoy said when he appeared. “Directly there, Cho. Is that clear? She’s not to speak to anyone on her way out.”

Cho nodded, got a grip on Chapel’s arm. “Yes, sir.”

“Oh, and Chris?”

She turned to him, her lovely face sullen ash.

“If you come within two decks of MedBay while you’re on suspension, I’ll send you to the booth.” He smiled. “Hell, I’ll take you there personally.”

The doors closed and his office was quiet again, his heart a hammer, his head steel.

He needed a drink.

Fuck, her _arrogance_. That’s what stunned him. Her presumption, her goddamn sense of entitlement to his position, his rank. He hadn’t asked to be promoted. It hadn’t even occurred to him that anyone might want the job, much less want it that goddamn much.

For the first time, he wondered if Chapel was an outlier or if his whole staff had it out for him, if Decker would try to stab him in surgery or Perez would drug him in the dispensary or if Eidar was dying to snap him in half for the hell of it.

He could defend himself if he had to. He wasn’t a total novice with a knife; better with a blaster. But he was a doctor, not his own goddamn bodyguard.

“What the hell,” he said, his voice a tired, heavy thread. “I need a drink.”

 

______________________

 

When beta shift started to stagger in, he went home and made a beeline for the brandy. Knocked back two before he had to sit down, had to pitch into the chair in front of his terminal and drink number three a bit slower. A bit.

He was still in it when the comm sounded. An unwelcome intruder.

He thumbed the switch without bothering to look up at the screen. “Yeah?”

“Do you have a few moments, doctor?”

Oh shit. “Sir?”

Kirk’s voice was neutral, his expression carefully blank. “I need to speak with you.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Good. My quarters. Ten minutes, please.”

“Your—?” McCoy said, but the screen was already blank.

Jesus, he thought. This day just gets better and better.

He put on a fresh uniform—a task that took longer than it should’ve—stepped into the corridor and ran right into Lieutenant Rand. A woman of elaborate hairstyles and short skirts and a bat’leth that never left her right hand. At least, McCoy had never seen her without it. Her face lit up when she saw him, which he was pretty sure meant she wasn’t there to kill him.

“Doctor,” she said pleasantly. “Hello. I’ll walk with you.”

“To what do I owe this honor?”

Her face bloomed into a smile. “The captain sent me, of course.”

“Of course he did,” McCoy muttered.

She took him to a private ‘lift, led him down a quiet corridor he’d never seen before, and stopped at a door with two keypads and another of the captain’s guards beside it: Galway, a slim, serious man with a fierce-looking phaser rifle. No question whose cabin this was, then.

Rand keyed in one code, Galway another, and the doors parted before him.

He took a deep breath and stepped into another world.

If he’d thought Spock’s private quarters were large, those he shared with Kirk were enormous. There was no room divider here; the anteroom bled into the bedroom, and taken together, they formed an open, sumptuous space. The walls were hung in shades of plum, rich velvet and Orion silks that stirred just enough to make the air itself seem alive. From the ceiling hung spindly lamps like those in Spock’s rooms, but these were far more ornate, entwined arms of gold and laudanum that sent a sensuous light over the shelves of antiquities that hung around the room. The only nod to function was a small table with a terminal; the rest of the space, so far as he could see, was designed for the pleasure of its occupants.

At its center sat Kirk beside a wide, beautiful bed. “Doctor,” he said, gesturing, a glass cupped in his fingers. “Do come in.”

He was seated in a low, plush chair. He was still in his uniform but his tunic was open, his sash tossed carelessly on the floor. Gone was the stern face from the monitor; in its place, a lovely, knowing smirk.

As McCoy approached, Kirk held out the glass, pointed at the bed. “Please,” he said. “Take this. Have a seat.”

“Thank you.” McCoy sat gingerly on the edge and raised the drink to his lips, caught a whiff and lifted an eyebrow, disbelieving. “Bourbon? This is bourbon?

“Mmmhmm. The real deal. None of that cheap Denebian crap.”

McCoy took a swallow, let it sit in his mouth, let fire lick at his cheeks. “Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I had real fucking bourbon.”

Kirk hummed, and McCoy could see he was pleased. “I thought you might like it.” He waggled the bottle. “Care for another?”

“God, please.”

Kirk poured then settled back in his chair, his startling eyes fixed on McCoy’s face. “I understand Chris Chapel is in your bad graces,” he said.

The doctor blinked. “Yeah. She is.”

“Well, it’s about damn time.”

“Sir?”

The captain laughed. “Shit, McCoy, she’s been angling for your job since the moment I promoted you. Don’t tell me you weren’t aware.”

“I wasn’t. Not until recently. Well. Today.”

“Oh, come on,” Kirk scoffed. “Subtlety isn’t Chris’ forte. And you’re no fool.”

McCoy set his jaw. “Well, the one thing I can tell you is that she’s been real vocal about her affection for you, captain.”

“My point exactly. She’s too fucking ambitious for her own good and not clever enough to earn her way up on her own. A dangerous combination, believe me.” He grinned at McCoy around the edge of his glass. “I’ve known a lot of Chapels in my day, doctor.”

“Have you.”

“Mmmm.” Kirk took a long, deliberate sip. “She tried to hire somebody today, after you shelved her.”

“Hire somebody? For what?”

“She reached out to one of your orderlies. Eidar. Seemed to think he’d be a sympathetic ear. Oh, she told him all about what an asshole you are, how badly you’d treated her, how much you needed killing, etcetera, etcetera.”

“Oh my god.”

Kirk shrugged. “Happens all the time.”

“To you, maybe. Not to me.”

“Fair point.”

“But Eidar, he didn’t go for it. Is that what you said?”

“Of course he didn’t. That’s not what he’s paid for.”

“What he’s—?”

A grin stretched over the captain’s face, a long, self-satisfied curve. “Somebody has to watch out for your best interests. Since you seem unwilling or unable to do so for yourself.”

McCoy’s head swayed. “You’ve been spying on me?”

“I’ve been looking out for you. It’s hardly the same thing.”

“Spying’s in the eye of the beholder, is that it?”

Kirk leaned forward in his chair, got so close McCoy could feel the sweet burn of his breath. “If you’d take my goddamn mark, McCoy, there wouldn’t be any need for this clandestine shit. I’d assign you a personal guard and nobody would even think about trying to cross you.”

“That feels like a threat.”

“It’s not a threat. Goddamn it, I want to protect you. I don’t understand why you won’t let me.”

“I’m still considering your offer. I haven’t rejected it out of hand.”

Kirk threw back his head and laughed. “Bullshit. You’ve made up your mind already.”

“I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have. Spock says you all haven’t bothered to discuss it for quite a while now. Too many other pleasant things to do, hmmm?”

Color rushed up McCoy’s throat, came to rest in his cheeks. “Captain, I—”

“No. Don’t do something boring like apologize. I don’t want to hear excuses.” His eyes were alight now, twin cobalt flares. “You should see Spock when he comes back to me, fresh from your bed, your spunk on his skin. When I put my hands where yours were, my mouth over your bites, he gets hard so fucking fast. He drips with it when I touch him, how good you make him feel.”

McCoy gripped his glass.

“It’s very simple,” the captain said. “You please him, you please me. And I wouldn’t have sent him to you if I didn’t think you were worth a thousand Chapels, at least. You’re already an asset to me, doctor, one I’m determined to protect. Why the hell won’t you let me?”

“I haven’t rejected your offer.”

Kirk shook his head, clearly amused. “But you claim you haven’t agreed to it, either.”

“No.”

“Then how about this?” Kirk downed the last of his drink and set his glass aside. Leaned forward until their knees nearly touched. “How about I assure you that if you swear loyalty to me, you don’t have to give up Spock.”

His heart caught in his throat. “What?”

“So long as he wants you, you can have him, too.” A breath. “On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

The captain smiled, this bright, beautiful thing. “I get to watch.”

“But I should warn you, doctor,” Spock said out of nowhere, “the captain has difficulty keeping his hands to himself.”

McCoy turned to see the Vulcan easing out of the shadows, away from a slim door he hadn’t noticed before.

Kirk chuckled. “Did we disturb your meditation, _ashayam_? I’m sorry. I did try to be quiet.”

“I have no doubt you did. But the interruption was not unexpected. Or unwelcome.” Spock mouth lifted. “Good evening, doctor.”

He was dressed in a dark, loose robe McCoy had never seen him in, one that fell in open folds across his body and that did little to hide his long acres of skin.

“Hi,” McCoy said. He tossed back a long swallow and let the flames singe his throat. Oh, hell, he thought. What in god’s name had he walked into? And so willingly.

The captain reached for the flask, handed it to Spock. “Give him some more,” Kirk said. “No, not like that. Give him the bottle.”

It was in McCoy’s grasp before he could protest, the sudden weight of it a shock, his fingers curling reflexive around its slender neck as Spock plucked away his glass.

Kirk settled back, crossed one leg over the other. He was smirking again, a little darker now. A little less lovely. He gestured at the bottle. “Go on. I want to see you to enjoy it. Embrace your inner glutton for me, doctor.”

McCoy didn’t like being goaded. “I’m hardly a glutton, sir.”

“Really? Then I’ve been misinformed. Spock seems to think you are. Don’t you, Spock?”

Spock sat down next to him on the bed, close enough for their hips to brush, for the lush fabric of his robe to tumble over McCoy’s knee. “I think that you are quite capable of devouring, Leonard, when you wish.”

McCoy flushed and tried to hide it behind a long, fervent swig. “I like to think I keep a pretty good handle on myself, most days.”

“Yes. Precisely.” Spock’s hand eased over his thigh. “There is much that you deny yourself.”

“Is there?”

“Oh, yes. That is evident.”

“Not to me.”

Spock kissed his cheek, his fingers dancing over McCoy’s fly, and he realized with a start that he was getting hard, that his heart already was in his ears, pounding, unexpected audience or not.

“Take the way your body reacts to me, for instance,” Spock said. “As if you had never been touched.”

A soft hum from Kirk’s chair, a shift and rattle of gold.

“You are angry, too,” Spock murmured. Softer now. “You have long denied yourself fury, although you have earned it. You feel that grief is safer. Less likely to get out of control.”

McCoy’s eyes were flickering, his grip on the bottle slipping. “Less likely to get me fucking killed.”

Spock’s thumb drifted, teasing the outline of McCoy’s cock. “Yes,” he said. “Perhaps. But the pressures you put on yourself—to behave in a certain way, to keep your emotions contained—you are denying yourself the right to feel alive.”

God. Was he? How much fucking alcohol had he had, that bullshit like that made sense? He’d never been one to keep his feelings in check, to coop them up unexpressed. Not until that day he’d been dragged off the sidewalk, the day he’d been thrown in a transport and yanked out of the life that was his and made to march in somebody else’s. When was the last time he’d let himself get really pissed with someone, before today? Was that why it’d hit him so hard?

The flask was pulled away and then Spock’s mouth was on his throat, a warm, perfect shock. “You need not deny yourself with me, Leonard. With us.”

“Us?” The word cut through his haze enough to get his eyes open, enough to make him taste fear.

Kirk made a low, soothing sound. “Doctor, doctor, it’s all right. This is just for tonight.”

“I don’t understand.”

The captain was touching him, his palm firm on McCoy’s knee. “I want your allegiance and I mean to have it,” he said. “But this, tonight, this is just a temporary truce. A way to test out our terms, if you like. But only if you agree.”

“Say yes,” Spock said in his ear. “Leonard, please, say yes.”

He’d be a fool to agree to this, McCoy thought. But he’d be a bigger fool to say no.

His eyes found the captain’s, his hand the hot plain of Spock’s chest. “Yes,” he told them both. “Yes. Yes.”

Spock kissed him, but only for a moment; then he rose and let the robe drop from his shoulders, form a dark pool at his feet.

Kirk groaned, a satisfying rumble, and McCoy found himself answering. Spock was swelling already, his cock lifting up towards his stomach as he stood between them.

“Goddamn,” McCoy said, sandpaper. “Come here.”

He grabbed Spock’s hips and Spock clutched at his hair. The Vulcan whined, slow and delicious, as McCoy drew his tongue up the shaft, rubbed his lips against the soft skin of the head. Somewhere, he heard the scrape of the chair, a series of swears, but those were far away. Spock was here, his thumbs turning over McCoy’s ears as he rubbed himself against the doctor’s mouth, his slick already sliding through McCoy’s beard and shit, McCoy had missed this.

He opened his mouth and Spock pushed into him, his back arching, his hips slamming home.

“Yeah,” Kirk said. “That’s right. Fuck his mouth, Spock. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

He lost himself to it, the scratch of Spock’s nails on his neck, the urgent hum of Kirk’s voice, the weight of Spock inside him, twitching, shifting, swelling as he clutched the back of Spock’s thighs, the soft swell of his ass.

“You look so good taking him,” he heard Kirk say, almost dreamy. “God, you do.”

He slowed his pace, sucking in an unsteady rhythm that had Spock swearing, grabbing at his hair, his balls slapping tight against McCoy’s chin as he tried to fuck in.

“ _Shit_. Don’t let him come yet, McCoy. Damn it. Don’t.”

There was a fresh pulse of slick in McCoy’s mouth and Spock groaned, beautiful and broken. “Oh,” he said, “Leonard, please.”

McCoy pulled away. “Oh no,” he said. “You’re not getting off that easy. Lie down.”

He gave Spock a shove and Spock turned towards the bed, tumbled past him. McCoy stood and tugged off his tunic.

“Well, well,” Kirk said hungrily. “Aren’t you something.” He was touching himself through his trousers, cupping the swell of his cock as McCoy kicked out of his boots, peeled out of his pants. “I’d never have guessed.”

McCoy gave himself a good, steady stroke. Felt a flush of satisfaction when Kirk’s eyes fell to watch. “I’m flattered.”

There was an irritated sound from the bed. “If you two have finished admiring one another,” Spock said, “perhaps we could continue?”

Kirk chuckled and his gaze swept back up. “Go on,” he said, nodding at the bed. “I want to see you enjoy him.”

McCoy sank a knee onto the bed, a second, and then Spock was reaching for him, a dark urgent wave. He pulled McCoy over his body and urged their mouths together.

“Leonard,” he said between kisses, no more than a whisper. “You are extraordinary.”

McCoy nipped at his jaw. “You’re just saying that because you want me to make you come.”

Spock tipped his head back, bid the doctor to bite at his neck. “Both things can be true. Is that so difficult to believe?”

Something stirred in McCoy’s gut, a feeling, inconvenient. Something too tender for a setting like this. He drowned it in the hollow of Spock’s throat, in the dip of collarbones, in the soft skin under his arms. He could feel their cocks sliding together, the inviting damp between Spock’s legs, could feel the way Spock twitched against his stomach as he lapped at the Vulcan’s nipples, drew them each in his mouth, one by one.

The Vulcan was writhing, twisting pleased with every kiss. His hands found McCoy’s shoulders and stayed there, his fingers flexing, squeezing, as McCoy nuzzled his ribs, counted each with his tongue.

Out of the corner of his eye, McCoy caught the captain’s shift, the spread of his legs, a sigh.

“Oh fuck, that’s pretty,” Kirk murmured.

McCoy turned his head, his lips never leaving Spock’s skin. Kirk had himself in hand. His cock was fat and angry but the captain’s hand was moving slowly, his grip tentative.

Kirk met his eye. “Don’t stop,” he panted. “Don’t stop now. He wants you to fuck him.”

A word of reproach: “ _James_.”

Kirk ignored him. “He does. He won’t tell you for some goddamn reason, but he’s dying for it.”

Spock made a frustrated noise and McCoy looked at him, watched the green streak his cheeks. “Ignore him, doctor. He is frustrated by the terms of this evening’s arrangement.”

“I am,” Kirk said. “But that doesn’t negate the fact, does it, that you want McCoy inside of you?”

“Is that true?”

Spock set his jaw, met his eye. “Yes.”

McCoy’s hips shot forward, unbidden. It felt like somebody had poured lava down his spine. “Fuck. Why didn’t you say something?”

“I did not want you to feel obligated.”

He kissed Spock’s stomach. Softened his voice to take the sting from his words. “That’s the stupidest damn reason I’ve ever heard.”

Spock’s hand found his hair. "It is not your duty to please me, Leonard.”

 _It’s mine to please you_. He didn’t say it, but McCoy heard it just the same.

“Of course it’s not,” McCoy said. “It’s my pleasure.”

He eased out of Spock’s reach, dragged his tongue along the wet mess of Spock’s cock, the heavy droop of his balls. He got his hands under Spock’s knees and pushed them up and only then did he realize how hard he was breathing, how stiff he was. How much he wanted to push into Spock’s body in front of his captain.

 _Spock is yours_ ,  _sir,_  he thought. But in this moment, you can’t touch him. He’s mine.

He laid his mouth over Spock’s hole. Gave him a single, incendiary lick.

“Fuck me,” Kirk groaned.

“There is lubricant,” Spock said, shaky.

“Fine,” McCoy said. “Good. But I’m going to lick you open first.”

His hole was rough, like sandpaper, softened a little by the slick that had slid down from his cock, by McCoy’s quick steady tongue, and when he could he fed Spock the tip of his finger, felt it ease in, steady and deep.

Somewhere, he heard the captain’s voice, rough: “Yes, that’s right. Does that feel good, beloved?”

Spock made a sweet, ragged sound and bowed his back, aimed his body at the stretch of McCoy’s finger, and his inner walls seemed to bloom, hungry for the promise of being full.

“Please,” he said. “Leonard, please.”

He sat up on his knees and smeared his free hand over Spock’s belly, gathered up slick and smoothed it over his cock. He could feel Kirk’s eyes on him, blue daggers, but all he could see were Spock’s, those familiar fathoms alight with anticipation, with need.

“Yes,” Spock said, a dry whisper, his palms outstretched, entreating. “Yes, Leonard. Please.”

There was a moment when they were not joined, not touching, and another when that was all that they were.

Inside, Spock was a fiery vise, so tight he held McCoy immobile, ensnared, and then Spock was stroking his face, winding his hands in the doctor’s hair. There were wind chimes in his mind, a warm breeze that allowed him to breathe, that urged him to take a deep breath, and when he did, Spock breathed with him, spread his knees and let McCoy feel the give in his body.

“I have made room for you,” Spock murmured. “Will you not take it and make it your own?”

The springs in McCoy’s body gave way, as if some part of him had caved in, and he leaned over, covered Spock’s mouth, whispered: “God, why do you say shit like that to me?”

Spock’s fingers on his face shifted, and just for a moment there was that sudden shot of cold, and then in his mind, he felt the soft sink of sand, the blister heat of the afternoon sun on a world he’d never been to, a world where the air smelled of copper, of crushed freja flowers spattered with blood.

 _Because I love you_ , Spock said. Didn’t say aloud. And yet McCoy heard the words just the same.

Spock’s hand fell from his face, clasped his neck, and they were fucking full-throated now, their hips slamming together, their skin seared, the captain egging them on:

“Fuck, yes, god, faster. Come on. He can take it harder than that, can’t you,  _ashayam_?”

And somewhere, McCoy could feel Spock’s nails biting into his ass, holding him fast, could feel that hot, soft mouth in an open grin that matched his own.

“Spock,” he said, shuddering. “Spock.”

He sucked a rose beneath Spock’s ear, licked at the blood that pulsed there. He could hear himself groaning, could feel how close he was to breaking, how badly he wanted to come. But louder than all of that, more real, were Spock’s thoughts inside his mind. He could feel them like vines, spreading from the tips of Spock’s fingers into his head, winding gentle, persistent with his own.

 _From that evening in my cabin, when we dined,_ Spock said.  _When you went to your knees. Every moment since then, you have undone me_.

“Oh god,” McCoy said, hollered, felt.  _Oh god_.

Spock drew his knees up and caught McCoy fast. Surrounded him, swallowed him.

 _I would have you inside of me always_.

In his head, in Kirk’s bed, he flew apart, a sandstorm broken by thunder, by the pounding sound of the rain, of Spock’s pleasure, fed by his. There were no more wind chimes, no more sun, only the pummel of Spock’s hands on his neck, on his back, the furious roar of Spock’s breath as he came between their bodies, his spunk burning McCoy’s skin beautiful as his mind whispered again:

 _Always_.

After a time, he remembered the captain. He lifted his head, turned, and the captain was still there, in his chair. His fist was wet, his cock, too, his face the color of roses. Their eyes met and Kirk moved like a snake; eased to his knees and slid over to the edge of bed.

“Come here,” he said. “Let me kiss you.” A plea. Not a command.

McCoy raised himself from Spock’s chest and Kirk met him halfway, cupped the back of McCoy’s neck and opened his mouth. The kiss was lazy, soft, soaked in satisfaction, and McCoy leaned into it, still lost in thoughts of Spock.

Spock was in love with him. Or so he’d said in the heat of the moment.

No. He’d meant it. McCoy was certain he had.

Only then did he realize fully that Spock hadn’t said it out loud, those words:  _I love you_ ; hadn’t spoken any of them. They’d only echoed inside of his head.

 _A mind meld_. Goddamn. He’d read about them, heard the stories, but he’d never considered what they’d be like in real life. The Vulcans didn’t like to talk about them, even to their doctors, and the smart ones learned never to ask. And he could see why.

He’d never felt anything like it, the sweep of Spock’s thoughts through his own, like a hand running through tall grasses, wind in a wheat field.

Spock was in love with him. He knew it. He’d  _felt_  it there, in the space Spock had made for their minds to wander together.

His gut went tight and his teeth caught Kirk’s lip. Spock hadn’t wanted his captain to hear it, what he’d said to McCoy. Hadn’t wanted his captain to know.

“Fuck, you made him feel so good,” Kirk murmured. “God. I could watch that shit all day.”

 _Could you? If you knew your inamorata loved me?_  McCoy thought, stroking his tongue over Kirk’s.  _But you’ve got no fucking clue, do you?_

Beneath him, Spock stirred. His fingers danced down McCoy’s back. “It is as I told you, Leonard: he cannot keep his hands to himself.”

Later, he’d wonder why he hadn’t pushed them both away right then and run, taken refuge in his quarters, in cold sheets and common sense. He’d thought he was so fucking smart. He knew something the captain didn’t, something potentially destructive, and he hadn’t grasped just how terrible such a secret could be. Fuck, he’d been a fool.

He should’ve run. In retrospect, he could see it.

But he didn’t. He stayed. Arched into Spock’s touch and licked at Kirk’s mouth and said:

“Then maybe the captain should give in to the inevitable and get into this damn bed."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers to Areiton for taking a looksee at this chapter.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers to [CorruptThySoul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorruptThySoul/pseuds/CorruptThySoul), whose kind, generous comment helped me shake the dust off this chapter and finally kick it out into the light.

James Kirk opened his eyes to the universe and for the first time in a week, his first thought was of something wonderful. 

For a week, he’d awakened from his few pitiful hours of rest already on edge. Had their shadow struck at last? Had he been knocked out of sleep by a photon blast, a terrible shaking of his ship, with the next bolt to come any moment? He’d lain there each morning holding his breath as the last of sleep left him, waiting for the next blow to fall. And when it hadn’t, he’d risen from the bed and reached straight for the comm: 

“Any visual contact, Lieutenant?”

And each morning, Illya’s voice had come back calm and steady: “No, sir. All quiet.”

Which was precisely the fucking problem. They didn’t know for sure that there was a ship out there at all. Nobody had actually seen a damn thing, except for a collection of particles that had no business being there, drifting in and out of sensor range.

Chekov had been the first to notice, with Spock not far behind, and when the strange readings continued into a second solar cycle, then a third, Kirk had convened a briefing, hoping his people could convince him to ignore his gut. Because what his gut was telling him was fucking terrible.

“We can’t forget,” he’d said, “no one in the Empire has been out this far before. So we don’t know what kind of shit went down at here in the past, do we? I mean, maybe tachyon clusters are normal in this sector, traces of starbound species we’ve never heard of or of some fucking war that laid all these systems to waste.” He turned to his navigator. “Illya? What do you think?”

Illya raised an eyebrow, reached out and readjusted the image on the viewscreen. “I think that is unlikely, sir. These particles have appeared in distinct clusters that appear to mirror our course; as we have changed course, so have these particles.” She clicked her tongue. “That speaks to something or someone alive, captain, not to historical detritus.”

Kirk swiveled his chair, turned to Spock. “Could it be some kind of wake turbulence? Any possibility that we’re swimming in somebody else’s shadow?”

Spock echoed Illya. “Unlikely, Captain. We have detected no evidence of warp-capable species in this sector or those that adjoin it.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

Spock dipped his chin in acknowledgement. “No. However, as the lieutenant noted, the only consistency in the clusters thus far is their relative relation to our ship. Each time they have appeared, they have been at the same approximate distance from and parallel to the _Enterprise_.”

Chekov chimed in. “And their intervals have not been predictable. They have followed no discernible pattern but they don’t appear to be wholly random, either.”

So let’s be clear here, Mr. Chekov," Kirk said, leaning back from the table, "are you saying we should definitely interpret this as a threat?”

The kid had flushed, his milky white throat running red. “No, sair,” he said. “That assumption is as yet unwarranted. But the evidence does strongly suggest that these particles are being generated by another vessel with an unknown power source.”

“One we have yet to locate and have no way to track,” Illya added. 

“And one,” Spock said, “that appears to be following us.”

The air in the briefing room had gone still. 

“Very well,” Kirk had said after a moment. “Until we know otherwise, we’re treating this as a clear and present danger. Moreau, I want to be ready for warp eight on a moment’s notice. Uhura, initiate internal security protocols as you see fit. Everybody else”--he glanced around the table, his eyes solid and steel--“one word of this beyond this room, beyond any of your bridge staff with a need to know, and you’ll pay. Are we clear?” 

A week like that, since. Spending every shift on the edge of a knife, sleeping with one ear peeled for the comm, or for an explosion, a shot from the dark that would blow them out of this uncharted stretch of sky.

But this morning was different.

He awoke to a grunt, an unsteady silhouette, to the vision of Leonard McCoy easing himself from the bed. Or trying to.

He fumbled about--searching for his clothing no doubt--and Kirk listened to him swear for a moment, smiling, until he took pity on the man and waved on the bedside light, no more than candle bright. 

McCoy froze, his arms half caught in his shirt. “Oh shit,” he said. “I’m sorry, Captain. I didn’t mean to--”

Kirk waved a hand at him, magnanimous. “‘S fine, doctor. Do what you need to do.”

McCoy’s eyes shot to Spock, still dead asleep on the far side of the bed. “You can turn off the light. I don’t want to wake him.” 

“You won’t. Not when he’s like this. He won’t wake up until he’s good and damn ready.” Kirk gave him a smirk. “We took a lot out of him, Leonard.”

Even in the dim light, the heat in the doctor’s cheeks was evident. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Guess we did.”

Kirk folded an arm beneath his head and made no pretense about watching McCoy pull himself back together. It was a damn shame, in a way, watching all that pretty flesh disappear again. But it was a pleasure, too, because now the captain knew what McCoy looked like beneath them, what he looked like when Kirk came on his face, and he couldn’t help reliving both as he watched the doctor slide into his pants and pull on his boots. 

When he was done, he moved to Kirk’s side of the bed and stood there looking down at him, those hazel eyes still dark with sleep.

“Captain,” he said.

“Doctor.”

McCoy hesitated a moment, then leaned over and laid his mouth over Kirk’s. A hesitant kiss. The polar opposite of their first. “Thank you,” he said.

Kirk sat up, traced the lines of that exquisite beard, and took another kiss, a proper one. Filthy. “You,” he breathed, “are very welcome.”

The doctor’s smile was a sly curve. “So might I expect a repeat invitation?”

Oh, the arrogance. It made Kirk’s exhausted cock stir. “Fuck yes. Sooner rather than later.”

McCoy slid away from the bed and slipped into the shadows of the room. Kirk heard the doors open, then close. He turned off the light and lay back in the darkness, the soft hum of Spock at his side. 

The doctor wasn’t the first being they’d brought to their bed, of course. Far from it. But he was, without a doubt, one of the most interesting. He was gorgeous, for one thing, and surprising: a steel blade sheathed in the unthreatening mask of a healer. Clever on top of that, and stubborn: goddamn, he’d been stubborn the night before, trying so valiantly to resist Spock, refusing at first to acknowledge how hot it clearly made him to have Kirk there, too, to be watched. And then, when Kirk had joined them, when he’d at last been allowed to touch McCoy, fuck--

He smiled. Stretched his fingers over Spock’s side and smiled again.

That’s what it was, wasn’t it? His stubbornness. The man reminded Kirk of Moreau.

She hadn’t wanted anything to do with him when he’d taken the _Enterprise_. Unsurprising, perhaps, given that she’d been one of Captain Archer’s favorites. She’d taken his Fleet-ordered removal hard. Very. Oh, she’d never been rude to Kirk’s face, or even behind his back--she was far too smart an officer for that--but she’d made it clear that she didn’t trust a word that came out of his mouth; a fact that, as far as Kirk was concerned, only underscored her intelligence. After just three years flying the _Farragut_ , he had a reputation, it seemed, and what good was a reputation if it didn’t make the right people nervous sometimes?

But Moreau was damn good at her job--the best chief engineer in the fleet, the numbers proved it--so Kirk had wanted her alliance, if not her allegiance, from the day he’d claimed the center seat. And there was only one person he trusted with the work he thought it would take to convince her.

“I’ve seen the way she looks at you,” Kirk had said, turning the words over Spock’s stomach. “On the bridge. And at that damnable commodore’s reception last week.”

Spock’s fingers traced his ears, his muscles trembling under Kirk’s tongue. “And how is that?”

Kirk made a considering noise and ducked his head, nosed at the dark curls around Spock’s cock. “Like she’d pay to put her mouth on this.”

“James--”

He licked over the crown, smeared his lips with Spock’s slick. “Like she thinks about you when she plays with herself. Like that. Like she sinks her fingers in her cunt and pretends it’s your tongue.”

Spock’s hips jerked and he grabbed Kirk’s hair, pulled his head down, and they didn’t talk for a time, after that. Didn’t need to.

“I’m not saying you have to fuck her,” he’d said later. He drew Spock’s head to his chest, stroked the sweat from his hair. “I’m just saying that it’s an avenue to consider. One way you might make our case. We need her with us, Spock.” 

“Yes,” Spock had said, the word heavy with sleep. “I will consider it.” 

He’d done more than that, in the end. 

He’d taken her here, in this very bed, stretched out between her thighs and teased her vulva with his fingers as he sucked at her clit, and when she’d come, her black hair a messy fan on Kirk’s pillow, she’d wailed like a hundred worlds dying and shoved her cunt against Spock’s face, buried him in the wet he’d brought to bloom. 

And when Kirk had abandoned his appointed post by the bed and knelt behind Spock, drawn his hands down the sharp planes of Spock’s back, Spock had still been at it, lapping the sweet from her, muddying his mouth with her slick.

“I thought you were content to watch,” Spock had said, less an accusation than a plea. 

Kirk had stroked his hole, watched it flutter for him, hungry. “Mmmmm. It’s not my fault you look so hot eating pussy.”

Spock had shattered with his cock in Moreau’s fist, the captain’s tongue in his ass, and fuck, how desperate Spock had been for both their hands on his body, how hard he’d come, how loud. Louder still when Kirk had fucked him, drawn him up on his knees and back into Kirk’s lap, Moreau watching them, her eyes hooded as she toyed with her clit and made herself come again and again in soft, shallow waves. 

“Do you see that?” he’d breathed in Spock’s ear. “You see how good you made her feel? You don’t even have to be touching her now. She can still feel you.”

Spock growled, an indistinct sound. 

He’d drawn his nails up the inside of Spock’s thighs. “And you’re not going to, are you? You’re not gonna touch her again, do you hear me? Never. Say it.” 

“Never,” Spock said, jagged. “No, James. Never.”

Kirk had kissed his neck and clutched his hips, fucked into him deep. “Yes, _ashayam_ ,” he whispered. “That’s right.” 

But last night, with McCoy, he’d made no such demand. 

Because he didn’t want to. Fuck no. He wanted last night to happen again.

In the dark, with the soft thud of Spock’s heart beneath his hand, Kirk heard a whisper, an echo of something old and adored at the back of his mind, unbidden:

_You must hold on to what is yours, what you deserve, and not let anyone take it from you, James. Never._

It had been a long time since he’d heard her voice; he’d gone most of his life without it. And it had been ages, too, since it had come to him so clearly, not as if in a dream but as if she were standing in front of him, staring sternly into his eyes.

_Hold on to what is yours, James. Always._

It had taken him years to learn that his mother’s ways as a captain were far from standard. Even in the Fleet, where some deviation from the rule was encouraged, Winona Kirk had done things very differently. Instead of encouraging dissension in her officers, she fostered discussion. Rather than surround herself in sycophants, she had cultivated her crew like her garden--a mad collection of beings from a dozen different worlds that she trained to feed off of each other’s energies and together, in time, they had thrived.

And at the heart of Winona’s success, she’d always told him, sat her son.

His earliest memories were of the warmth of her body, the feel of her heart in his back as he looked across a table and stretched his hands towards the others gathered around it: her officers, his family. The boom of Vulcan laughter, the swoop of strong arms that lifted him from his mother’s lap and tucked him close, the whisper of words he didn’t understand in his ear. A half dozen faces around the table, each as familiar as his mother’s; he’d been raised by them aboard the _Tereshkova_ , as much the child of an Andorian, a Rigeliian, an Edosian, a Vulcan as he was of a human. 

Looking back, he marveled at it, his mother’s faith in her officers. To kill or capture a captain’s child would have been worth a fortune to the right bidder and the devil knew his mother had enemies, especially as the _Tereshkova_ flourished, as her crew grew rich from her captain’s prowess. Winona’s name had become known in the Fleet, in the Empire, and such notoriety was rarely a gift. 

Yet if there was blood in his childhood, Kirk could not remember it now. Aboard the _Tereshkova_ , even in the midst of the fiercest firefight, he was never afraid.

Some of that was nostalgia, he knew that; the patina of time and his mother’s long absence coating those years with a sense of security that he suspected they hadn’t actually earned. It didn’t matter. The ship, most of those people, existed only in his memories now. He could make of them whatever he wished. Of his mother, most of all.

In their bed, he rolled closer to Spock, buried his face the soft hot at the back of the Vulcan’s neck, and heard her voice again, another of her favorite admonishments: _This is what you were born to do._  

The first time she’d said it, they’d been walking through the _Terehskova’_ s magnificent gardens, holding hands, the dirt quiet under their feet. His very favorite place, those gardens had been. Only later, years after she’d died, did he realize what an oddity that beautiful place had been, the one she’d hollowed out for them inside of a starship. She’d taken three decks that should’ve held weapons and armor and filled them with a living army instead, soldiers from a dozen worlds whose branches reached ever upward: apple and olive from Earth; Qu’va from Kronos; the skinny, arid trunk of the S’uavac from Vulcan, its body thinner than the spread of two fingers, its flowers a pale purple pink, and yet the spicy sweet smell of its leaves sank into your hands, your clothes, any part of you that you allowed them to touch. Even the roses that lined the path bowed before the rich scent of the S’uavac.

He remembered looking up at her, her face framed by the trees and the sky, the stars beyond the viewport seeming close enough to touch. Remembered asking: “What, Mama?”

She spread her free hand before them, around them. “Command a starship, like this one. Although yours will be bigger even than this, no doubt. Faster, stronger, better.”

“Oh,” he said.

It’d never occurred to him before that there would be a time when he was grown, when he might have a ship of his own. He was still young enough then--how old had he been? Three, maybe. Or four--that he thought of the Fleet solely in terms of the ship his mother commanded, the ship on which they lived. He understood enemies, that there were other ships in space that wanted to hurt or kill them, but the idea of other vessels like this one, different pieces in the same Fleet, was much fuzzier.

His mother stopped, knelt down on the path. Looked him in the eye. “Listen to me, my love: in some ways, this is your birthright. You’ll carry my name, when you’re bigger, and all that I have accomplished, and the whole Empire will look at you and know who you are, who you’re destined to be.” She cupped his cheek, the scars on her palms rough and familiar. “But even so, it won’t be handed to you, your future. It isn’t a given or a gift. You’ll have to work hard for it. Do you understand?” 

He hadn’t, then. Not really. But he’d nodded anyway.

“You’ll have to learn a great deal,” his mother said. “There will be things you’ll have to sacrifice, to give up, I mean, in order to have a ship of your own.” Her expression sharpened, and he knew that this was important, what his mother was saying, even if he didn’t understand it all yet. “And you’ll have to hurt people, sometimes, in order to get what you want.”

He frowned. “With the agonizer?” 

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes not.”

His confusion must have been plain because he remembered her chuckling and gathering him to her, close. “My darling,” she’d said, the words hot in his hair, “you are extraordinary. And there will be those in your life who feed that, who’ll encourage you to be more than you are. But there will also be some who’ll do everything they can to extinguish it, to drag you down, to stamp out all that’s special in you.”

He’d pressed his face against her neck. Her medals bit into his chest a little but she smelled good, of S’uavac and apple blossoms, and she hugged him hard, her voice the captain’s now, fierce: “But you mustn't let them. You must hold on to what is yours, what you deserve, and not let anyone take it from you, James. Never.”

“Won’t.”

She laughed again, only for a moment, then squeezed him once more. “You must promise me that you’ll hold on to it, darling. Tight tight. Like I do to you. Can you do that for me?”

He remembered snuggling deeper into her arms, feeling the pound of her heart against his chest. “Yes, Mama. Promise.”

And he had, hadn’t he? He’d had to. Ever since Gary. 

Mitchell had been two years ahead of him at the Academy, five years old than Kirk but parsecs wiser in the ways of the universe than he, a captain’s son, dutiful and studied and smart, had ever been. Gary wasn’t a legacy and he was proud of it, how he’d pulled himself out of some godforsaken mining colony near Titan and blazed his way to San Francisco, to the top ranks of his class. Even in his third year, he was whispered about, rumored to be a favorite of Fleet Admiral Komack himself, but it was his beauty that had first won over Kirk: his knowing hands, his clever mouth, those lazy brown eyes.

They’d met at a bar six weeks after Kirk set foot on campus. No names at first, just hungry glances, then a hand on his back that he’d leaned into as it steered him away from the crush, into the damp narrow of a supply closet. He didn’t remember their first kiss, their second; no, the first thing he really knew about Gary was the curl of his voice, low and determined, the way he hummed in Kirk’s ear as he yanked Kirk out of his tight civvie jeans and gave him a handjob for the ages. 

“God, you’re pretty,” Mitchell hissed, like it was a personal affront. “The moment I saw you, this was all I could think about, getting you back here, making you come.” He sucked a bruise on Kirk’s neck, high above his collar. “Couldn’t hear a word anybody said tonight, don’t remember who I talked to, who I saw. I was an asshole to everybody that came near me because I was hard, so goddamn hard from just looking at you.” 

Kirk clutched at his shoulders and whined and gave it up in quick, eager spurts as Gary bit him, sunk his teeth into Kirk’s throat and whispered: “Yeah, just like that. Feels good, huh? Been a long time since somebody touched you the right way, hasn’t it?” He tugged again, too hard too soon, and Kirk cried out, his hips quaking. “Mmmmm,” Gary said, dragging his mouth over Kirk’s, “that’s ok. More for me.” 

He’d taken Kirk home and eaten him out and then pushed into him, watching Kirk’s face as he moved, pinching Kirk’s nipples as Kirk played with his cock, jerked himself in time with Gary’s thrusts, and when he’d come again, pouring white over his fist, the look on Mitchell’s face had gone feral and he’d pounded Kirk harder, gone to pieces with a deep, satisfied groan.

“I’m Gary,” he’d said in the morning, giving Kirk a sleek, sexy grin. “Gary Mitchell.”

Kirk leaned over and kissed him. “Hi,” he murmured. “I’m James Kirk.”

He caught it in Mitchell’s face, fleeting, the surprise, the flicker of recognition at his name. He’d seen it a lot in San Francisco. “James, huh?” Gary said, his eyes sharpened, appraising. “Well. You seem more like a Jim to me.”

Nobody called him “Jim,” nobody, not even his grandmother, but it made sense coming from Mitchell because with Gary, Kirk felt like somebody different. Gary was the first person who’d ever made it seem like being James Kirk alone wasn’t enough, and in the throes of it, in Gary’s bed, with Mitchell inside his head, Kirk came to think that Mitchell was right.

“You need to relax,” Gary said, yanking the PADD out of his hand, chucking it away. “You’re always so fucking uptight.”

“I have two tests next week,” Kirk began, “and one of them is--”

Mitchell laughed, the dirty one that always sunk right to Kirk’s cock. “Next week?” he purred. “Next week’s real far away, Jimmy. You’ve got plenty of time for that shit.” He turned Kirk’s chair so his crotch was right there, the line of his dick in Kirk’s face. “I think you’d much rather play right now, wouldn’t you? Hmmm?”

“No,” Kirk said, and they both knew it was a lie, because his fingers were unfastening Mitchell’s trousers, his mouth falling open and eager.

Gary stroked a hand through his hair, blunt touches that met in a fist. “Of course not,” he murmured. “Not you, my golden boy.”

Kirk hadn’t realized how hollow he was until he met Mitchell. His whole life, he’d been comprised of ambition and absolute focus and drive and now that he’d reached his goal, now that he was at the Academy, he was like a drum, all sound; inside, aching and empty, and Gary was right there, ready to occupy him, to fill in the gaps between his thoughts, between his legs, between every goddamn cell in his body.

With Mitchell, sex was everything, inevitable, glorious, nothing like the boys Kirk had fucked in Riverside or Chicago or New Toronto. He was unapologetically rough, sometimes, rarely tender, always ready to get Kirk revved up. He liked watching Kirk come and would make him get off when he didn’t want to, when he was sore or dry or both. Sometimes Mitchell didn’t touch him, just fucked him, and sometimes all he did was touch, his big hands covering Kirk’s skin covetously, like he couldn’t get enough it, like he wished it were his. Sometimes, they’d go so long and hard that Kirk would lose track of time, day and night merging into an intense, aching gray, and he’d wake up with Gary’s come drying on his ass, on his belly, in his hair, and wouldn’t remember when he’d last seen a sonic, when he’d last eaten a meal, the last time that he’d been in class.

And then sometimes, he couldn’t get enough of it because the hollow place inside him, the drum, was so loud that he couldn’t think, didn’t want to, just wanted Gary to stuff him full and never let him go. 

“Are you getting hard again?” Mitchell said, his hands tight on Kirk’s thighs, his eyes boring into Kirk’s face. “Jesus, Jim. Come’s still wet on your belly and your little prick’s already stiff again.”

Kirk groaned, put his head back and bounced on Mitchell’s dick faster.

“You’re fucking insatiable,” Gary breathed. “Goddamn. Fuck, I love you like this. Such a slut for my cock, aren’t you? Fuck, Jim, come on-- _fuck_.”

He’d never been in love before but he was sure that this was what it was supposed to feel like, like Gary was the only thing that mattered, the only reason he breathed. The universe, he was certain, had brought him to the Fleet just for this: not to pursue his destiny or build on a legacy but to find the love of his life.

He was sure of it.

But sometimes, when Mitchell was sleeping beside him, when Kirk’s body was quiet and let his mind be, his thoughts would drift to the readings he hadn’t done, to the exam he should have aced, to the practicals he was putting off until the last minute, until he had to, until Gary would have to let him go long enough to get his work done. He was James Kirk, he’d think, listening to the wee hours fade, and that meant something to him, it should. But then Gary would sigh and press his face against the back of Kirk’s neck and he’d remember all the good there was in being Jim, too, the man who shone under Gary’s hands, the one who didn’t worry about anything beyond the four corners of their bed, the one who didn’t have to feel the hollows, the great acres of space in his head and his heart that Gary seemed so certain he owned.

“You’re thinking too loud, kid,” Mitchell said, rusty. “Go back to sleep.”

What Gary did was put a question in his head that he’d never considered before: who was he, beyond his mother’s son? Beyond the overly serious kid always conscious of the eyes on him, the weight of his promise, his responsibility, his legacy a golden anchor around his neck. The pressure to be the best, the most clever, the sharpest, ever present, something he’d put on himself, always. It was hard not to--living in her house, the one her success far beyond Iowa had bought; her parents’, once, now his. It was her hometown, Riverside, not his; he’d been born in space, the jetsam of two Romulan warbirds floating just beyond the _Tereshkova_ ’s shields, the cries of their crews still ringing in the dark, songs of his mother’s latest triumph, as he’d slipped from her, squalling.

“You were mad that you missed it,” she used to say, pushing his curls from his forehead. “An hour earlier and you’d have been right in the thick of things.”

He looked in her face and tried to smile. Wrapped his arms tighter around her leg. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You tried to, you know. I could feel you in here, wiggling around and pounding your little fists on my belly every time we were hit. You wanted to get out and see what was going on.”

She leaned back in the rocking chair and reached for him, plucked him from the floor of the porch and settled him in her lap. “But I wasn’t ready for you to be gone yet. I wanted to keep you close a little longer, so I held you back.”

She’d been wearing something soft, Kirk remembered, not her uniform. An ancient plaid shirt, maybe, or a sweater. It’d been cold, winter stretching its fingers over the fields, tentative, ready to chase fall away for good. She would be leaving soon, getting ready for another year or two up there in the sky, and this time, he wouldn’t be with her. He’d be stuck here with Nana and Pawpaw because he was old enough now for school and that was his job now, his mother told him: to learn, to get as smart as he could, to build up his brain so one day, he too could work in the sky.

He was six then and he’d spent his whole life in the stars, at his mother’s side, and the idea of losing both made him sad, this awful, low feeling that was louder than anger. Two months they’d been here, at what she said was her house, one she’d bought for him to live in with his grandparents, and now, just when he didn’t hate it, didn’t get up every morning confused by the sun, by the absence of perpetual night, she was leaving. 

“James,” she said as the moon stretched its arms in the sky, “sometimes I wish I hadn’t let you go, that you were still in here with me.” She sighed, a sound that shook her whole body. “Sometimes, even though you’re a big boy now, I reach for you, here”--she took his hand, pressed it to her stomach--”and I’m surprised when I don’t find you.” 

Kirk looked down at their joined hands, flexed his fingers over soft fabric. “Mama,” he said, “that’s silly. I’ve been out here a long time.”

She laughed. “Of course you have,” she said. “And you’re right, it’s very silly. I’m a silly sentimental bird, aren’t I?” She scooped him up and stood in one fluid motion, and they stood there a moment, staring together at the place where the land met the sky. “Come on,” she said, finally, and her voice sounded funny, like her throat was full of water. “It’s cold out here, huh? Let’s go in and ask Pawpaw to make us some hot chocolate.” 

But she hadn’t moved, Kirk remembered, had stood there, shivering, holding him close just a little bit longer.

Something in her must have known.

The _Tereshkova_ had died and so had his mother and so he’d become James Kirk, Winona’s son, and he’d fought every day for twelve years to get into the Academy, to get back to space, to command a ship of his own, and somehow, with his tense mouth and his hooded eyes and his greedy hands, Mitchell managed to make him forget that, forget where he came from and why he was there and why being James Kirk mattered.

Then he got a summons on his comm, terse and formal, from someone determined to make him remember. 

“Is there something going on?” the Vice-Admiral had said, his frown cutting through the afternoon twilight that hung in his office, drifted in from the bay. “Something you want to tell me about?” 

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Your grades have slipped over the last two quarters. Badly. For reasons I can’t quite understand.” He made a face. “I mean, a low pass in Command Fundamentals? What the hell is that? You were weaned on that shit, son." 

Kirk flushed, the color climbing over his ears. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You keep saying that,” Pike said. “And yet I don’t believe you.” He leaned across his desk, his hands pressed to the marble. “I knew your mother, Kirk. Served with her on the _Lafayette_ when you weren’t even a gleam in her eye. She was a good officer then, a great one later. One of the best captains the Empire’s ever had. And you expect me to believe that her kid is at the bottom half of the class in 75% of his coursework? Bullshit, Kirk. That’s bullshit.”

“She’s been dead more than a decade, _sir_ ,” Kirk said, the snide slipping out before he could stop it. “She can hardly tutor me from the grave.”

Pike stood up, one smooth motion that made something in Kirk’s gut go cold. “You and I both know that you’re dishonoring her memory--her faith in you!--at best, and at worst, son, you’re doing yourself a disservice, shivving your career before you even get off the ground.” 

The look in his eyes was so fiercely disappointed that Kirk had to look away. “Sir.”

“Ok,” Pike said, softer now. “So if we can agree that’s what’s happening here, that you are pissing your potential down your leg, then at least do me the courtesy of telling me why. Not because I knew your mom, or because you owe it to me as the head of the Academy, but because you owe the truth to yourself.” Then he was in front of Kirk, the tips of his fingers under Kirk’s chin. “Let yourself hear it, alright?”

Kirk closed his eyes, just for a moment. He felt like he’d swallowed a stone. “I’m involved with someone,” he said. “And it--I don’t know, there’s just not a lot of room for me in my own head anymore. It’s easier, when I’m with him, not to think." 

Pike didn’t say anything. Waited patient for Kirk to go on. 

“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, how much of me he has, how much I’ve given to him.” He’d never put it into words before, what Gary made him feel--not even to Gary--and it was hard, harder than he’d have thought. But Pike wasn’t judging him, Kirk could feel that, and that helped. “It isn’t enough, for this guy. I’m not. I think he wants all of me. No. I think he wants me to be his version of me, and I--I’m not sure which is which anymore, who I am versus who he wants me to be.”

The Vice-Admiral let that hang in the air for a moment. “The question is, then: is that what you want? Is it making you happy, being with this guy?”

“I don’t know, sir." 

“For what it’s worth, Kirk: you don’t look happy. You look like crap.” 

“Sir,” Kirk said, stiff, and Pike laughed.

“What can I say? I know from shit. What’d you think I do all day up here, talk to happy, well-adjusted cadets? No. I spend my days with malcontents like you.”

Most of the admirals Kirk had ever met in his life were cloaked in menace, all scheming frowns and twisted fingers, and it threw him a little, Pike talking to him that way, brash in his informality, his words tinged with something that felt like affection.

“Look,” Pike said, “I’m not going to tell you what to do. That you’re here proves to me that you’re capable of making tough decisions when you have to. But what I can tell you is that the choices you’re making now will have an impact on the rest of your life. And right now, that impact isn’t looking so good.”

“Sir,” Kirk said again. “Yes, sir.”

“But what does give me hope, Cadet Kirk, is that you’ve said the three words that separate good commanders from great ones. Do you know what they are?”

“No.”

Pike grinned, laid the letters out with his hands. “ _I don’t know_. See, good commanders try to bullshit their way through sometimes, try to convince themselves and everybody around them that they have all the answers. Great commanders have the fortitude to admit that they don’t, and then do all they can to find them out. So when you tell me that you don’t know if this situation is what you want or not, that gives me hope; that makes me think that we made the right decision in bringing you here. It makes me think that you have what it takes to make it up there, in that big empty sky, where it’s just you and your ship and your crew every day up against the unknown.” He clapped Kirk on the shoulder. “I have faith in you, son. The Empire does. Remember that.”

“I will,” Kirk said. “Thank you, sir. I will.”

Pike may have been the spark, but it wasn’t a simple decision. There wasn’t a definitive day when Kirk woke up and thought, _Today I’m gonna break up with Gary_. It was more of a slow, inexorable slide, a steady progression of arguments that drove things into the ground.

“What is it that you want from me?” Gary would say, pacing around Kirk’s rooms like a disgruntled lion. “You need _space_? What the fuck does that mean, Jimmy?”

“I need time to get my shit together.”

“What shit?”

“School stuff. My work, my readings, you know. My grades are a fucking mess.”

Gary laughed at him, his handsome face ripped and cruel. “The great James Kirk has to worry about _grades_? Really? Since when?" 

“I’ve gotten behind, ok, and I have to--” 

Mitchell got in his face. “They’ve got a building named after your mom, kid. I think you’re gonna be fucking fine.”

Kirk’s ire settled in his fists and he tried to take a deep breath. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“The hell it doesn’t,” Mitchell said, and then they were kissing and Kirk was clawing at Gary’s back, hitching his hips and saying _please_ and Gary won a lot of fights that way, by giving Kirk his mouth and his hands.

It took weeks to extract himself completely, and even when they finally broke up, when he stormed out of Gary’s rooms for the last time, it was impossible to get out of Mitchell’s orbit entirely. They were in some of the same classes and they’d get into arguments in front of their peers, cross swords over the Empire’s history or astro-navigational strategies and Kirk would feel their smirks like a snowstorm, drifting silently over his shoulders, as they whispered, _You know what this is really about, right?_ What had been love once became a public kind of disgust, an utter lack of patience with the other that neither of them tried to hide. 

Sometimes, they still fucked, furious, battering each other in ways less bound to pleasure than release. Kirk hated how much he still liked it, liked having Mitchell pressed against his back, liked the sound of his balls slapping Kirk’s skin, like the ache in his ass when Mitchell was done.

His grades climbed and he got assigned better ships for his practicals--thanks in part to Pike, he was certain--and by the end of his second year, by the time Gary graduated, Kirk was finally more or less free.

Still, the night before Mitchell shipped out to the _Vashti_ , headed for star systems unknown, he’d knocked on Kirk’s door and Kirk had let him in, had let Gary suck him dry and then twist him open slick with blunt, ungracious fingers. He put Kirk on his belly and worked into him slow, the way Kirk had always liked, always asked for and rarely gotten, and when Gary was all the way in, he went silent, didn’t utter a sound as he fucked Kirk hard and steady, not letting up for a moment. He pinned Kirk’s hands to the mattress, his knuckles going white with the strain, and by the time he finished, filled Kirk up with his heat, Kirk was thrashing, desperate to come again, desperate be touched. But Gary didn’t. Didn’t touch him, didn’t speak, just drew away from the sheets and left Kirk alone, cold.

He heard the rustle of clothes and Gary’s boots moving towards the door, but he kept his head on the pillow, his eyes closed. Chose not to look back. 

“I loved you,” Mitchell had said, his voice like a spear. “You shouldn’t have needed any more than that, Jim. Fuck the Empire. Fuck your career. I should’ve been more than enough.”

After Gary, he started to figure it out, what it really meant to be James Kirk. 

He was tougher, after Gary, quicker to show anger, smart enough to know when to let it go. He stopped flinching from other people’s pain and started to learn how to use it, how to wield it like a saber or a broadsword or a club. He stayed centered on what mattered--service to the Empire, the promise of his own ship--and he settled under Pike’s wing, let the Vice-Admiral guide his course choices, his studies, his career. He acknowledged what he didn’t know and he did all he could to address it. And he embraced his legacy, his destiny and worked to become his mother’s son, wholly:  ruthless and clever, a natural-born commander, someone whose word could be trusted as well as his knife.

But Mitchell left him wounded, too, left scabs too stubborn to heal. He stayed hungry for sex, fucked whomever he wanted, when, but he didn’t feel anything, nothing like the long endless fall that Mitchell had screwed into his heart, and that was in part by design. In the right hands, love was a murder weapon, he could see that now, and he had no desire to be at its mercy ever again.

And he didn’t need affection, anyway, didn’t miss it, because the Academy was a blur of beauty willing and then, on the _Farragut_ , there was Carol, his ideal: pretty, connected, and ambitious. She was happy to fuck a first officer and then thrilled to be a captain’s inamorata, to pleasure him publicly, to sleep in his bed, to squeeze his head between her thighs and shout his name so the whole deck could hear it, if that’s what he wanted. In any other place, any other posting, he would’ve been pleased with her, too, would have counted himself fortunate that an admiral’s daughter was such a good lay as well as key to a possible alliance.

Except there had been Spock.

 

******

 

At first, Kirk had barely noticed him, the dark-eyed Vulcan with officer’s braid who never said much, be in briefings or on the bridge. In time, Kirk figured out Spock’s silence was an acknowledgement that Garrovick had no interest in whatever the Vulcan might say; indeed, the captain seemed to go out of his way to ignore him on those rare occasions when he did choose to speak. 

Which was a big reason why Kirk started paying attention to him, honestly; why he began making it a point to sit next to Spock, to pick his brain _sotto voce_ , to watch his eyes and figure out when he was sitting on something good, when there was an insight on the edge of his lips, unspoken. Because Garrovick, he’d learned pretty quickly, was an overconfident idiot who couldn’t see past the end of his own dick, and if he was brushing Spock off, it was probably because Spock was a hell of a lot smarter than he was.

“So,” Kirk said as they rose from the briefing room table one day, made their way towards the door, the last of the officers lingering. “What do you really think, Spock?”

The lieutenant commander turned, one eyebrow arched elegant. “Sir?”

Kirk waved his hands around the now-empty space. “About this thing on the Tantalus colony. I got the impression you didn’t agree with the captain’s assessment.”

He could see Spock consider it: was this a trap? A first officer probing for loyalty? Or something else? “Neither did you,” Spock said finally. 

“True,” Kirk said, his best dagger smile. “But I asked you first.” 

Spock pursed his lips. “The captain’s reluctance to send additional security with the new governor when she beams down seems to be based on a faulty assumption.”

“And what might that be?”

“That the inmates on Tantalus pose no threat to the Empire or its representatives. That because of the nature of their offenses--”

Kirk remembered Lieutenant Lindstrom’s sociological summary: “‘Attempting to subvert the cause of war,’ right?”

Spock inclined his head. “Yes, And thus, due to the nature of their unfortunate pacifistic tendencies, the captain has concluded that there is no possibility of danger to the ship.” 

“But you think there is, don’t you?”

“Commander,” Spock said, “there are always possibilities, and statistically, many of them are unpleasant.”

Kirk crossed his arms and leaned back against the table, not trying to hide his grin. “So what’s the possibility of extra security being an absolute necessity for this landing party, Mr. Spock? Roughly speaking.” 

“Given the opportunity posed by a transfer of power--a momentary weakening of defenses borne of the relief that the current general and his staff no doubt feel in anticipation of their departure--coupled with the overall laxness in security protocol that I observed on our last visit to the colony some 2.3 years ago, I would put the probability at 33.4 percent.”

“Jesus, that high?”

“Approximately.”

“Why the hell didn’t you say something to Garrovick?”

Spock shifted, his cheeks tinged kelly green. “I did, sir. Before the briefing. The captain was unimpressed by my analysis.” 

Kirk could feel himself starting to boil. “That’s bullshit, Spock. What in the fuck is it gonna cost him to send down an extra four or five bodies from security? I’ll tell you: a hell of a lot less than it would for him not to, if you’re right.”

Spock’s eyes settled on him, stayed. “May I ask: what was your objection? One I noticed that you also did not volunteer.” 

“Nothing numeric, I’m afraid. Nothing solid. Just a gut feeling that something’s wrong--with the new general, the old one, or the inmates, I’m not sure.”

“Still,” Spock said, “as his first officer, it is your responsibility to offer the captain all of the alternatives as you see them, is it not?” 

There was a challenge in his voice, in his face, that Kirk really, really liked. “It is,” Kirk said, spreading his hands, “but that’s based on the assumption that the captain gives a shit about what I say, is it not?” 

Spock smiled, this small, hot slash altered his whole affect, swept away the last vestiges of mild, leaving only menace in its wake. “Yes,” he said. “It is.” 

They were both right.

The incoming general was ambushed upon arrival by the outgoing one--the one who should have been pulled out, it seemed, long ago. A decade of isolation with 300 inmates devoted to peace, to disrupting the work of the Empire through obstinance and inaction had done a number on the general’s psyche, so much so that he was willing to kill rather than leave his beloved populace. 

It was fortunate, Kirk had supposed, that the general was willing to die for his useless brethren, for that was one step the Empire was happy to ensure they took together.

As Garrovick called for the planet’s destruction, for the cobalt bombs to be launched, Kirk gave Spock a look over his shoulder, a wink, and when he got smile back in return, was it any wonder that after that, it was goddamn impossible for Kirk not to be aware of him, every damn moment of the day? 

Spock, son of Earth and progeny of Vulcan. A being born of privilege, of power, of two worlds that formed one fist. What the fuck was he doing on a second-rate ship like the _Farragut_ and so far from the center seat? This ship, and most finer, could have been his for the taking based on his bloodline alone, much less his accomplishments at the Academy--far better marks and kill ratios than Kirk had ever managed to achieve.

And yet there he was, allowing a worm like Garrovick to ignore him, to deride him, all the while piddling along in science when by rights he should have been in command. Why?

It was a heady problem, an interesting one, and he found himself watching Spock again, looking at him. Always looking. At his sleek hair and his dark eyes. The rippled promise of his body beneath his uniform, always covered from his throat to his boots. The heat of his lips against Kirk’s cheek; fuck, he could almost feel it, the way Spock would drag them between his thighs, that clever tongue teasing his dick, those long hands on his hips, guiding, letting Kirk fuck into the slow suck of his mouth.

He was hot all the time then, all over, a crawling want that never shut up, that was never quite sated, no matter how many times he had Carol on her knees, or how many eager ensigns he fucked in the pleasure rooms, how many times he jerked off to the thought of Spock’s beautiful, inscrutable face.

He was hotter still every time Garrovick failed to put Spock on a landing party, or openly ignored his counsel--but that was a different kind of heat, a fury, a murderous fucking rage, and when the chance came to cut the captain down, Kirk didn’t hesitate. 

“The Fleet will be stronger without you,” Kirk said, spitting the words into the captain’s shocked, gray face as the man lay carved in half, his blood a happy lure for the fucking vampire cloud. “And the best part is, few will even notice you’re gone.”

He’d been working for months to secure the crew’s faith, their affection--they’d been hungry for it, any scrap of real attention from Command--and when he beamed aboard after, leaving their ex-captain’s corpse on the planet below, few batted an eye. Except Spock.

“I am honored,” Spock said, “and I appreciate your faith in me, sir, but--”

Kirk looked up from his monitor. “But what, Commander?” 

Spock flinched a little, still uneasy with his new title. “But I have little aptitude for command.”

“Little aptitude or little interest?”

“I do not wish to rule a starship, captain.”

“That’s not what I’m asking you to do. And even if it were, your wishes are far less relevant than what is best for the Empire, are they not, Mr. Spock?” 

“Sir.” 

Kirk rose, turned around his desk, and it took everything he had not to touch Spock, not to put his hands on that angular face and bite at those thin, worried lips. “To be clear: you will have additional duties as my first officer, but you will retain those of science officer as well. Is that understood?”

Spock’s eyebrow lifted, but his voice betrayed no surprise. “It is.”

Kirk smiled. “Tell me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I suspect you were not given a chance to practice command on this ship, under the previous leadership.”

“You are not wrong." 

“In my opinion, Spock, you would make a fine starship captain. An excellent leader. And I hope you’ll give me a chance to show you how that might be.”

Spock gave him a quiet, tentative smile. “As you wish, sir.”

And it was not so far from that moment to Orani, to Spock’s mouth, that smile pressed against his, to Spock’s skin spread before him, under him, welcoming him in, and oh, the noises Spock had made while Kirk fucked him, these sweet, aching sounds, as if Spock had been waiting for him his whole life.

But it was when their minds touched, when he felt the terrible beauty of Spock’s thoughts, their fire, their light, that he knew that he’d been waiting for Spock, too, this steel of a man who sheathed himself in solemnity, in patience, when beneath it all, this Vulcan, he burned.

He was better with Spock, sharper: as he encouraged Spock to embrace his strengths, he learned to hone his own. Together, they were formidable, powerful, a force to be feared, and in those first months together, the Empire, it seemed, might one day be at their feet.

And now they had McCoy. What more might his presence make possible?

There was something wild in the doctor; Kirk had already known that. But there was something in his kisses, in the arch of his back, the greedy thrust of his hips, that hinted at something darker, a kind of fury buried down deep. Perhaps it was because of how little control he had over his life, how few choices he must have had. He was no willing servant of the Empire, he was its slave; there was a reason, after all, that the suicide rate among conscripts was so goddamn high.

But Kirk had fucked slaves before and there was more to the doctor’s anger than that. No, whatever it was that’d made him so, McCoy was a blade, the best kind, the kind not easily spotted. A weapon that hid in plain sight, like Spock. On the one hand, the man was truly a healer; and, as his clever intervention with the Mlla attested, one with a thoughtful heart. In someone else, those qualities might have been weaknesses, a soft underbelly easily cut, but in McCoy, they seemed instead to feed a fervor, a ferocious drive to make all the forces he could not control somehow bend to his will, even if only for a moment. 

No wonder Spock was so fucking enchanted. He smiled, felt himself stir. No wonder he was, too. 

He sat up a little and laid a kiss on Spock’s cheek. Nuzzled his ear. Gave him another.

“Spock,” he murmured. “Beloved. Are you awake?”

Spock made an unhappy sound, a sigh of protest that only grew louder as Kirk wound an arm around his stomach and leaned in to kiss him again.

“You are,” Kirk said. “Or you should be. We’re due on the bridge soon. Don’t make me drag your ass up there naked. I will, you know. No doubt about it.”

The Vulcan’s eyes squeezed shut tighter and he rolled a little, buried his face in the pillow.

Kirk reached up and stroked the damp hair from Spock’s forehead. “Well, _ashayam_ ,” he said. “Your dreams must be fucking sweet indeed.”

He opened his hand and let his fingers drift, drink in the heat, and all at once he slipped into Spock’s thoughts, tumbled like a thief in the dark, and what he saw there, what he felt, what he _knew_ , sudden and terrible, might as well have ripped out his heart:

 _McCoy_.

Water, where there should have been sand. Waves whipped by wind where there should have been only fire.

Fuck, McCoy had been in Spock’s head, had been _invited_ in, that son of a bitch! Had lingered in the one place that Spock had always sworn--that Kirk had made him fucking swear--would always be only Kirk’s own. He could see the depth of their meld, how fast it had grown. How many times had they done this? Had Spock betrayed him so completely, shit-- 

Spock shoved Kirk away and sat up, his expression horrified. “James,” he stuttered, “captain, I--!”

Kirk’s stomach lurched. His hand ached for a knife. “What the fuck, Spock?” he shouted. “You fucking traitor! You _bastard._ What the fuck have you fucking--?!" 

And then they were both falling, thrown hard from the bed by a concussion that shook the bulkheads so hard that they screamed. For a moment, it seemed like the room was on fire, so bright was the terrible screech, the howl of Kirk’s ship as she burned. 

“Red alert!” Chekov’s voice shouted over the comm, his voice full of panic. “Red alert! Keptain to the bridge!”


End file.
